LIBRARY 

UNIVERSITY  Of 
CALIFORNIA 

SAN  DIEGO 


THE   INTELLECTUALS   AND  THE  WAGE 
WORKERS 

A  STUDY  IN  EDUCATIONAL  PSYCHOANALYSIS 


The 

Intellectuals  and  the  Wage  Workers 
A  Study  in  Educational  Psychoanalysis 

By 
HERBERT  ELLSWORTH  CORY 


New  York 

The  Sunwise  Turn 

MDCCCCXIX 


COPYRIGHT.  1919 
THB  SUNWISE  TURN,  INC. 
PUBLISHED  DECEMBER.  1919 


To 

CARLETON  H.  PARKER 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

I.  Equality          ......         1 

II.  Proletarianism         .         .         .         .       -  .       18 

III.  Religion         .         .         .         .         .         .29 

IV.  Criticism 45 

V.  History  and  Freedom      ....       62 

VI.     Liberty  ......       97 

VII.     The  Class  Struggle  and  Fraternity  .     122 

VIII.     Education,  A  Program  for  the  American 

University      ......     240 


I. 

EQUALITY 

With  the  development  of  the  Industrial  Revolution, 
the  growth  of  modern  middle-class  democracy,  the  con- 
summation of  the  laissez-faire  competitive  states,  the 
relations  between  artists,  scientists,  patron  and  public 
have  become  more  and  more  equivocal.  In  England 
Doctor  Samuel  Johnson's  famous  letter  to  the  Earl  of 
Chesterfield  sounded,  over  a  hundred  and  fifty  years 
ago,  a  kind  of  emancipation  proclamation  of  the  artist 
against  the  gentile  servitude  of  patronage.  Neverthe- 
less patronage  has  continued.  Artists,  educators,  and 
scientists  are  still  too  often  mere  flunkies.  But  whereas 
patronage  under  Renaissance  aristocracy  was  some- 
times rationally  planned,  patronage  under  middle  class 
democracy  is  almost  invariably  capricious,  utterly  di- 
vorced from  a  healthy  institutionalism.  Very  rarely 
does  the  captain  of  industry,  with  a  modicum  of  dis- 
crimination, assume  the  artistic  noblesse  oblige  of  the 
lord  of  earlier  days.  For  him  at  best  esthetic  values  are 
the  dessert  of  life  or  those  afterthoughts  some  little  at- 
tention to  which  will  prove  that  he  is  thoroughly  re- 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

spectable.  The  discoveries  of  science  he  values  only  as 
they  lead  obviously  and  instantaneously  to  further  in- 
dustrial exploitation.  So  today  artist,  educator,  and 
scientist  stand  half-parasite,  half-pariah,  and  their 
voices  are  heard  scarcely  at  all  in  the  great  tumult  of 
class  war  and  the  growing  murmurs  of  social  recon- 
struction. Let  us  not  pity  them,  however,  for  until  they 
dare  to  realize  that  the  dignity  of  research  is  intimately 
bound  up  with  the  joy  in  life,  the  workmanly  pride,  the 
moral  autonomy  for  which  society  should  allow  release 
in  the  most  oppressed  "unskilled"  laborer  today,  our 
artists,  educators,  and  scientists  have  no  insight  what- 
ever, no  courage,  no  integrity. 

The  competitive  laissez-faire  state  is  obviously 
doomed.  Everywhere  collectivism,  some  of  it  sinister, 
some  of  it  benignant,  gains  ground.  Every  day  the 
plutocrat,  like  the  aristocrat  before  him,  loses  more  and 
more  of  his  directly  operating  power.  As  we  look 
about  we  cannot  but  see  that  geographical  boundaries 
are  becoming  more  and  more  blurred,  that. the  peoples 
of  enlightened  countries  are  moving  in  battle  array 
against  the  autocratic  countries  in  favor  of  universal 
democracy — that  is  to  say  the  privilege  of  democracy 
for  those  who  want  it — and  in  favor  of  self-conscious 
internationalism.  But  as  the  geographical  sub-divi- 
sions become  more  and  more  confused  the  economic 
sub-divisions  become  more  and  more  clear.  For  at 

[2] 


EQUALITY 

the  base  of  all  lie  the  biological  and  economic  needs. 
A  materialistic  life  is  not  a  life  but  a  living  death.  Yet 
without  bread  we  cannot  contemplate  spiritual  things. 
Those  economic  units,  in  consequence — employers'  as- 
sociations, co-operative  consumer's  societies,  farmers' 
leagues,  industrial,  occupational,  and  craft  unions — 
grow  ever  more  and  more  liberally  and  firmly  defined, 
autonomous,  eager,  with  a  sense  of  a  part  to  play.  Will 
they  accentuate  the  crudities  of  contemporary  class- 
wars?  Or  will  they  come  more  and  more  to  act  in  uni- 
son, in  a  spiritual  efficiency,  to  make  this  the  happiest 
world  upon  which  mankind  has  yet  gazed? 

One  after  another  artists,  educators,  and  scientists 
are  springing  up  who  are  brave  enough  to  assert  that 
they  have  suggestions  to  make  both  to  these  economic 
subdivisions  and  to  the  great  states  which  enclose  them 
and  seek  to  arbitrate  their  differences.  Therefore  it  is 
fitting  that  such  artists,  lovers  of  art,  scientists,  and 
teachers,  those  who  aspire  to  bring  the  various  crafts 
and  professions  closer  to  science  and  the  fine  arts — for 
the  sake  of  art  and  science  quite  as  much  as  for  the  sake 
of  the  crafts  and  professions — should  unite  even  as 
these  industrial  groups  have  united,  or,  better  yet, 
should  fuse  themselves  in  union  with  the  various  ap- 
propriate industrial  groups  to  form  associations  not  for 
personal  aggrandizement  but  for  a  richer  and  more 
spontaneous  and  more  rational  personal  expression. 

[3] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

By  far  more  critical  and  energetic,  as  a  whole,  than 
the  artists  and  scientists  are  the  wage-workers,  whose 
only  rivals  in  reconstruction  are  those  who  are  elaborat- 
ing and  integrating  the  younger  sciences  which  deal 
with  man  and  his  relations  to  his  fellows,  those  who  de- 
velop certain  biological  fields,  and  the  psychologists  and 
ethnologists.  British  labor  has  called  to  the  forward- 
looking  intellectuals  to  unite  themselves  with  the  wage- 
workers  in  a  community  of  producers,  and  it  is  the  task 
of  these  essays  to  elaborate  their  program.  But  first 
the  intellectual  must  humble  himself  and  recognize  that 
hitherto  progress,  when  it  happens  to  be  made,  is  as  a 
fact  made  largely  at  present  by  less  rational  means,  by 
the  trial  and  error  of  cultivated  and  uncultivated  mobs 
and  by  the  lucky  stroke  of  some  individual  much  mis- 
understood. The  truly  rational  man,  naturally,  will 
co-operate  with  the  most  legitimately  vital  of  these 
forces  as  he  studies  them  and  will  not  be  amazed  to 
discover  how  rapidly  they  have  been  growing  towards 
rationality  even  before  he  contributed  his  little  intelli- 
gence to  their  refashioning.  By  far  the  most  legiti- 
mately and  sustainedly  vital  of  these  forces,  he  will  find, 
is  the  labor  movement.  The  rational  man  needs,  then, 
to  become  bilingual,  to  know  the  language  of  the  acad- 
emic sciences  and  the  language  of  the  socialisms  "revo- 
lutionary" and  "revisionist."  Soon  even  the  backward 
American  proletariat  will  emulate  its  comrades  in  Eng- 

[4] 


EQUALITY 

land  and  invite  the  American  "intellectuals"  to  join  it  in 
magnificent  reconstructive  achievements.  Let  the 
American  "intellectuals"  be  prepared. 

A  truly  critical  "intellectual"  will  begin  immediately 
a  sweeping  re-examination  of  the  concept  of  "equality." 
And  if  he  is  sufficiently  rigorous  and  comprehensive  he 
will  be  filled  with  high  hopes.  For  a  moment  he  will 
be  depressed  by  the  mob-sentiment  which  cries  most 
loudly  that  "all  men  are  created  free  and  equal."  Be- 
cause he  knows  this  to  be  at  present  not  a  fact  he  may 
too  readily,  like  the  unscrupulous  politician,  pretend  to 
regard  it  as  existential  in  order  to  control  and  exploit 
the  gregarious  instinct  and  discourage  reasoning  which 
is  so  likely  to  be  dangerous  to  the  status  quo.  Quack- 
remedy  for  social  diseases!  And  as  the  patient  often 
hates  his  surgeon  so  the  mob  is  often  moved  to  stone 
the  critic  who  questions  the  rapturous  faith  in  the  ex- 
istence of  "liberty,  equality,  fraternity."  Moreover  let 
us  never  forget  that  the  word  "mob"  refers  to  a  state 
of  mind,  not  a  social  stratum;  there  are  mobs  of  "cul- 
tured" men  as  well  as  mobs  of  the  "uncultivated."  But 
the  critic  may,  without  growing  too  sentimental,  cure 
himself  of  his  irascibility  by  murmuring  to  himself  a 
sentence  from  Charles  Lamb:  "A  mob  of  men  is  better 
than  a  flock  of  sheep,  and  a  crowd  of  happy  faces  jost- 
ling into  the  playhouse  at  the  hour  of  six  is  a  more 
beautiful  spectacle  to  man  than  the  shepherd  driving 

[5] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

his  silly  sheep  to  fold."  And  the  true  critic  is  bound  to 
discover  ultimately  that  the  sincere  aspiration  towards 
some  intelligible  equality  is  the  only  dependable  pro- 
moter of  human  solidarity  that  endures  and  widens. 
This  he  discovers  as  he  searches  history  that  he  may 
sublimate  these  equalitarian  phrases  of  the  strtet  and 
multiply  their  vital  and  logical  relations.  He  sees 
how,  for  instance,  the  dreams  of  equalitarianism  began 
to  assume  the  proportions  of  plausibility  in  the  English- 
speaking  world  about  the  time  that  Doctor  Price  de- 
livered the  famous  democratic  sermon  which  aroused 
the  leonine  wrath  of  Burke;  how  the  vision  fired  the 
London  Correspondence  Society  and  stirred  up  the 
reaction  and  oppression  of  the  scared  conservatives  who 
followed  Pitt,  how  the  dream  glowed  on  none  the  less 
in  the  half-disillusioned  pages  of  Godwin,  and  flamed 
almost  out  of  sight  in  the  benevolent  anarchism  of 
Shelley.  Ah,  but  then  came  the  biological  realists  prov- 
ing that  all  men  are  not  created  equal.  Well  then,  ac- 
cepting the  biological  fact,  let  us  retrace  our  steps  and 
scrutinize  more  carefully  these  old  aspirations.  Though 
Huxley  was  superbly  hard-headed  are  we  sure  that  his 
inferences  were  quite  sound?  As  the  critic  retraces  the 
more  recondite  origins  of  "sentimental  equalitarianism" 
(as  Mr.  Paul  Elmer  More,  would  dub  it)  the  critic 
sees  how  subtly  established  were  the  eighteenth  century 
faith  in  equality  and  the  eighteenth  century  faith  in 

[6] 


EQUALITY 

human  perfectibility  through  the  life  of  unfettered  rea- 
son. He  sees  there  implications  already  buoyant  in  the 
epistemology  of  John  Locke  with  its  rejection  of  the 
doctrine  of  innate  ideas  and  its  shift  of  emphasis  from 
a  binding  prenatal  past  to  a  future  in  which  all  things 
are  possible  except  the  word  "impossible."  Let  us  re- 
member this  shift  of  emphasis  from  an  overshadowing 
past  to  an  unknown  but  alluring  future  even  while  we 
echo  the  amusement  of  all  the  good  text-books  over 
Locke's  notion  of  a  mind  blank  at  birth,  a  mind  wholly 
open  to  receive  impressions  from  the  world.  The  critic 
will  admire  Locke  even  while  he  watches  his  empirical 
theory  of  knowledge  go  bankrupt  under  the  dissolving 
analysis  of  Berkeley  and  Hume.  With  certain  Rous- 
seauists  the  blank  and  open  mind  became  plausibly 
endowed  with  natural  goodness  and  this  turn  makes  the 
Lockian  epistemology  seem  today  more  nai've  than  it 
really  was.  But  the  critic  of  today,  while  deploring  all 
this  loose  thinking,  comforts  himself  with  a  recollection 
of  its  passing  value  as  a  revolt  against  the  Puritan  doc- 
trine of  the  innate  depravity  of  man,  and  as  a  corrective 
of  Hobbes'  more  realistic  but  also  nai've  conception  of 
the  individual  as  moved  by  a  "lust  of  power  after  power 
that  ceaseth  only  with  death."  And  today  the  critic  can 
reconcile  these  simpler  epistemologies  and  psychologies 
in  a  view  which  keeps  like  spring  man's  hope  for 
equality.  We  now  know  that  we  are  all  born  with 

[7] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

certain  neural  dispositions  or  instincts.  William  James 
more  than  anyone  else  has  taught  us  both  in  his  psy- 
chology and  epistemology  that  these  neural  disposi- 
tions are  facts  which  simply  are,  that  they  are 
neither  depraved  nor  good  until  they  turn  to  good 
ways  or  bad  ways,  that  the  pugnacious  impulse,  for  in- 
stance, may  not  be  suppressed  but  may  some  time  be 
redirected  towards  a  "moral  equivalent  of  war."  Freud 
has  shown  that  in  all  of  us  there  stirs  constant  struggle 
between  "censor  wishes"  and  rebel  wishes  which  are 
to  be  integrated  not  by  suppression  but  by  reconcilia- 
tion. Mr.  Walter  Lippmann  has  made  a  brilliant  ap- 
plication of  Freudian  psychology  to  current  political 
reform.  And  while  modern  psychology  teaches  a  pos- 
sible equality  of  dispositions  within  an  individual  who 
has  mastered  the  harmony  of  healthy  self-control,  mod- 
ern ethnology  resurrects  our  hopes  of  an  equality  of 
individuals  within  the  world,  by  engendering  a  growing 
distaste  for  the  glib  phrase  "backward  races."  Even 
the  psychiatrists  with  their  necessary  recognition  of  the 
hideous  inequalities  in  morons  and  imbeciles  have  come 
nearer  to  the  equalitarian  hope  of  late.  Once,  in  a  panic, 
they  talked  of  nothing  but  segregation.  Now  they  have 
abandoned  this  purely  negative  doctrine  for  plans  to 
give  to  this  human  flotsam  and  jetsam  opportunities  for 
the  fullest  life  attainable  in  safe  isolation  from  healthier 
human  beings.  So  the  critic  comes  to  realize  that 

[8] 


EQUALITY 

though  the  doctrine  of  equality  as  a  deduction  from 
Locke's  empirical  theory  of  knowledge  was  prema- 
ture, and  though  it  presupposed  conditions  within  the 
individual  and  within  primitive  societal  arrangements 
that  never  existed,  and  though  the  deduction  of  "nat- 
ural rights"  has  ended  in  something  very  close  to  de- 
spair, nevertheless  the  hope  springs  eternal  where  we 
least  look  for  it  from  the  very  sciences  which  threatened 
it.  We  can  now  believe  that  youths,  as  passionate  as 
ever  but  endowed  with  a  wisdom  not  incompatible 
with  passion,  will  create  children  born  under  increas- 
ingly better  conditions  by  biological  intervention,  that 
men  may  reconcile  their  inner  conflicts  through  self- 
discipline  which  means  the  redirection  of  their  in- 
stincts, that  nations  are  capable  of  appreciating  their 
mutual  worth  and  of  realizing  the  infinite  promise  of 
racial  variability  for  organized  progress,  whenever 
they  will  to  approach  "aliens"  in  the  spirit  of  modern 
ethnology,  with  minds  as  ready  to  learn  as  to  teach. 

The  critical  intellectual  does  not  blink  the  fact  that 
the  Industrial  Revolution  in  England,  with  its  concom- 
itant laissez-faire,  still  dominates  today,  or  that  the  mad 
prodigality  of  Jacksonian  and  later  American  periods 
has  made  equalitarian  hopes  in  the  United  States  seem 
almost  as  primitively  remote  as  the  days  of  the  sabre- 
toothed  tiger.  He  diagnoses  the  contemporary  situa- 
tion and  he  sees  few  sincere  attempts  towards  equality. 

[9] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

He  sees  dangerous  tendencies  towards  imperialism  in 
the  utterances  of  some  senators,  in  the  chaos  of  petty 
loyalties,  of  what  Hegel  calls  "the  self-estranged  social 
mind,"  a  state  of  mind  in  which  (as  Hegel  warns  us) 
communities  invite  convulsion  and  ruin.  And  the  critic 
sees  some  of  those  who  have  the  floor  (reactionary 
esthetes,  business-men,  moralists,  and  politicians)  cry 
out  that  the  remedy  is  more  imperialism,  nee-aristoc- 
racy, bureaucracy,  or  "state-socialism."  The  critic  sees 
this  element  of  truth  in  the  reactionary  point  of  view: 
that  the  stability  of  aristocracy  gave  the  leisure  neces- 
sary for  development  of  that  kind  which  makes 
at  least  a  few  of  the  economic  necessities  beauti- 
ful. He  sees  that  if  the  middle-class  regime  were  not 
unstable  it  would  have  great  art,  science,  and  religion. 
Our  factories  would  rise  like  temples  of  a  miraculously 
new  style  in  architecture.  Our  laborers  would  not  be 
the  slaves  of  machines  and  we  should  need  no  H.  G. 
Wells  to  dream  of  an  evolutionary  conquest  of  men  by 
machines  endowed  by  man's  own  blind  cunning  with 
some  hideous,  impassive  intelligence.  Machines  would 
be  our  slaves — the  only  slaves  in  human  society.  The 
critic  finds  that  Ruskin  and  Morris  were  partly  right 
and  partly  wrong  in  their  diagnosis  of  the  Industrial 
Revolution  and  Victorian  laissez-faire.  They  did  see 
that  short-sighted  buccaneers  of  the  market-place  were 
wantonly  befouling  our  lives.  They  did  see,  what  was 

[10] 


EQUALITY 

far  more  important,  that  we  must  organize  in  guilds 
and  educate  ourselves  to  share  more  rationally  our  so- 
cial duties  with  the  State,  and  they  thus  played  their 
part  in  the  inspiration  of  the  most  coherent  economic 
and  political  program  in  the  world  today,  that  of  the 
British  guild  socialists.  Ruskin  and  Morris  were 
wrong,  however,  in  thinking  that  it  was  because  ma- 
chinery was  invented  and  factories  planted  beside  the 
sweetly  garrulous  and  hitherto  unsullied  streams,  be- 
cause the  air  was  made  grim  with  canopies  of  smoke, 
and  because  the  new  powers  of  steam  dragged  men 
and  children  from  their  homes  that  art  and  morality 
and  religion  fell.  Today  the  critical  intellectual  as- 
serts that  these  things,  though  evil,  will,  if  treated  with 
defiance  and  mastery,  prove  convertible  into  incalcula- 
ble good.  To  destroy  machinery  and  factories  would 
be  to  destroy  a  valuable  current  that  might  be  turned 
towards  progress.  Morris's  News  from  Nowhere  is 
thus  in  many  respects  on  the  same  intellectual  plane 
with  the  earlier  outbursts  of  the  Luddite  rioters  of  Eng- 
land and  the  weavers  of  Germany.  We  needed  the 
subtle  experimentation  of  the  labor  movement  of  post- 
Chartist  days — that  hard-headed  period  of  the  labor 
movement  which  Sidney  and  Beatrice  Webb  love  to 
praise — to  purge  and  to  elaborate  the  vision  of  Ruskin 
and  Morris.  Just  here,  too,  the  critic  will  try  to  in- 
crease vital  and  logical  relations  by  winnowing  and 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

fusing  the  best  in  the  irregular  prophecies  of  men  like 
Ruskin  and  Morris  with  the  larger  and  more  logical,  if 
somewhat  too  fatalistic  analysis  and  forecast  of  Karl 
Marx.  The  democratic  bourgeoisie  has  so  ordered' 
things,  say  Marx  and  his  continuator  Engels,  that  life 
is  full  of  capricious  vicissitudes.  Petty  capitalists  are 
crowded  into  the  proletariat.  Bankruptcies  abound 
even  among  the  larger  capitalists.  Panics  and  that  con- 
dition absurdly  and  deceitfully  called  "prosperity"  al- 
ternate with  implacable  certainty  yet  caprice.  Inter- 
national wars  follow  as  larger  expressions  of  the  grow- 
ing socialization  of  the  means  of  production  in  trusts, 
coupled  with  irreconcilable  anarchy  of  control  by  a 
fortuitously  elevated  minority  of  uncritical  minds,  who 
plunge  into  foreign  investments  as  soon  as  domestic  in- 
vestments cease  to  stir  their  feverish  imaginations.  Al- 
ways the  world  is  full  of  paupers,  tragic  failures,  and  a 
minority  of  nouveau  riche.  Now  the  latter,  as  Ruskin 
and  Morris  knew,  are  always  vulgar  and  often  cruel. 
And  before  they  can  develop  esthetically  and  ethically, 
their  money  evaporates  and  we  have  to  devise  a  new  tra- 
vesty of  art  and  science  for  a  new  crop  of  nouveau  riche. 
The  critic  sees,  now,  that  all  men  are  not  created  free 
and  equal.  Unlike  the  San  Francisco  business-men  who 
opposed  the  investigation  of  earthquakes  by  certain 
scientists,  with  a  cry  of  "hush,"  lest  business-optimism 
be  injured,  the  critic  insists  upon  the  existence  of  the 

[12] 


EQUALITY 

facts  of  evil  and  is  entirely  uninterested  in  trying  to 
transcendentalize  them  away  with  mystical  raptures, 
metaphysical  dialectic,  or  the  "boosting"  of  myopic 
business  promoters.  He  sees  clearly  that  all  men  are 
not  created  free  and  equal,  but  find  it  quite  possible 
to  believe  that  in  a  world  of  rising  socialists  and 
syndicalists,  of  eugenists,  psychoanalysts  and  ethnolo- 
gists, all  men  can  in  the  future  be  created  more 
nearly  free  and  be  given  equal  opportunity  by  the  ra- 
tional scientific  control  of  larger  and  larger  areas  of 
change,  and  by  the  autonomy  and  self-discipline  of  the 
advancing  proletariat.  To  many  uncritical  minds  such 
a  scheme  will  seem  Utopian.  Self-styled  artists  often 
whine  for  a  perpetuation  of  their  parasitism  in  status 
quo  at  the  very  moment  that  they  are  whining  at  the 
horrid  commercialism  of  this  age.  Specialists  in  he- 
redity just  now  incline  to  be  a  little  fatalistic  and  neo- 
aristocratic.  "Practical"  financial  capitalists  are  still 
too  busy  making  a  reductio  ad  absurdum  of  unregu- 
lated and  merely  quantitative  production.  But  the  art 
of  these  "artists"  is  trivial  and  abstract.  The  metho- 
dology of  these  hereditarians  is  as  yet  avowedly  naive, 
their  data  meager,  and  they  still  ignore  the  findings  of 
closely  allied  sciences  which  have  intimate  and  revolu- 
tionary messages  for  them.  The  critic  with  a  really 
contemporaneous  scientific  methodology  sees  that 
Marx  was  saved  from  his  own  quasi-Hegelian  fa- 

[13] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

talism  by  the  fact  that  he  was  at  once  economic  "theo- 
rist" and  labor  agitator,  for  the  pragmatists  have  re- 
minded us  that  "science  is  the  formulation  of  control" 
and  that  by  definition  "every  science  longs  to  be  an 
art."  To  those  who  have  really  read  the  history  of  the 
labor-movement,  especially  the  history  of  French  and 
Italian  syndicalism,  of  the  Russian  ferment,  and  of  the 
"Triple  Alliance"  of  workers  in  Great  Britain,  the 
prophecy  of  Karl  Marx  does  not  seem  altogether  fossil- 
ized: as  an  hypothesis  it  seems  more  plausible  than 
most  things  in  this  bewildered  day  that  the  advancing, 
self-disciplined  proletariat  will  control  more  and  more 
of  the  caprices  of  change  and,  in  alliance  with  the 
more  sincere  and  sacrificial  among  the  intellectuals, 
will  restore  many  of  the  really  valuable  ideals  of  aris- 
tocracy and  engender  a  multitude  of  new  ideals  in  a 
more  unequivocally  democratic  society  than  any  which 
has  yet  existed. 

With  such  assurances  the  critical  intellectual  can 
steer  a  reasonably  safe  course  between  "diplomacy" 
and  pedantry.  Honesty,  whatever  its  limitations,  is  the 
best  policy  in  the  life  of  reason.  The  critical  technique 
of  a  Huxley  is,  in  the  long  run,  victorious  over  the  ped- 
antries and  "diplomacies"  of  bishops.  Noble  men,  who 
do  not  wish  to  be  quixotic  martyrs,  often  seek  sadly  a 
moral  substitute  for  "diplomacy"  which  they  know  cor- 
rupts ultimately  even  the  most  lofty  who  stoop  to  use  it 


EQUALITY 

as  a  means  to  realize  even  a  noble  ideal.  Enlightened 
and  constructive  criticism  is  safer  than  mad-cap  pro- 
test and  infinitely  more  valuable.  Of  course  it  is  not  ab- 
solutely safe  because  life  has  never  been  absolutely  safe 
nor  would  any  critic  want  it  so.  But  it  is  more  pro- 
foundly safe  than  "diplomacy"  which  can  so  subtly 
corrode  even  a  sublime  spirit. 

We  are  learning,  too,  from  the  psychoanalysts  that 
the  really  constructive  critic  must  allow  the  person 
criticized  to  do  practically  all  the  work,  to  purge  him- 
self with  a  minimum  of  help  from  the  critic  when- 
ever he  drifts  into  insincerity  and  prejudice.  Some 
revolutionary  people  confuse  criticism  with  pedantry 
and  cowardice.  As  incorrigible  adolescents  they  insist 
on  working  out  their  own  ways  violently  and  thus  meet 
an  early  disillusionment.  When  such  people  are  over- 
come they  often  imitate  the  more  "diplomatic"  or 
pedantic  methods  and  grow  cynical  as  they  watch  their 
souls  ebb  away.  Such  mistakes  of  violence  may  of 
course  but  lead  to  that  disillusion  which  begets  a  new 
and  finer  faith,  which  purges  away  superbia  and  brings 
about  the  wedding  of  true  pride  and  humility.  But 
too  often  youth  has  his  pegasus  shot  from  under  him. 
The  true  critic,  on  the  other  hand,  can  quietly  defy 
the  "diplomatic"  foe  as  Descartes  defied  authority  in 
his  unobtrusive  but  courageous  way  for  a  lifetime,  not 
without  much  suffering  but  with  a  fulfillment  ever 

[15] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

richer  and  richer.  Criticism  has  all  the  discretion  of 
"diplomacy"  without  its  deceit,  all  the  accuracy  of 
pedantry  without  its  paralysis.  By  multiplying  sharp 
distinctions  without  losing  artistic  joyousness,  religious 
harmony,  by  multiplying  logical  relations  and  keeping 
them  vital,  by  searching  cunningly  among  our  desires 
and  dreams,  it  can  hopefully  resist  the  ignorant  or 
unscrupulous  enemy,  and  if  it  is  slain  it  is  slain  to 
good  purpose  for  its  slogans  are  soon  caught  up  by  a 
hundred  new  and  more  resonant  voices.  And  it  can 
base  itself  firmly  on  the  new  hope  towards  equality 
that  has  been  purified  out  of  the  sentimental  but  im- 
mortal eighteenth  century  faith  in  equality. 

Phrased  in  psychoanalytical  terms  this  aspiration  to- 
wards equality  alike  with  the  sentimentalists  of  the 
eighteenth  century,  with  the  romanticists  of  the  nine- 
teenth century,  and  with  the  realists  of  the  twentieth 
century  is  an  intimation  of  what  Dr.  Trigant  Burrow 
more  clearly  envisages  as  "the  preconscious  or  the  nest 
instinct."  The  critical  intellectual,  seeking  richer 
harmonies  within  himself  and  in  society  at  large,  will 
listen  to  its  murmurings  within  himself  and  find  it 
more  clearly  in  the  accents  of  militant  proletarians  as 
the  symphony  writer  finds  his  purest  themes  among  the 
folks.  The  aspiration  toward  equality  means  our  reali- 
zation that  we  are  all  biologically  of  the  same  stuff. 
It  means,  as  the  most  consistent  and  dynamic  psycho- 

[id] 


EQUALITY 

analysis  recognizes,  that  our  primal  "\\ish"  or  "libido," 
already  perfected  in  our  tranquil  life  in  the  womb  be- 
fore birth  brings  the  first  cry  of  pain,  reality  and  what 
we  call  consciousness  (conflicts  inner  and  outer), — our 
primal  wish  is  the  wish  to  love,  to  share,  to  identify 
ourselves  with  all  men  and  women  and  children,  to 
rejoice  that  we  are  all  alike  made  of  the  same  marvelous 
germ-plasm  upon  which  "nature"  has  been  patiently 
at  work  for  millions  of  years.  Let  us  not  yield  to  our 
"resistances,"  those  fevers  of  lust  and  hate,  those  chills 
of  ignorance  and  fear.  The  self-conscious  psycho- 
analyst and  the  inspired  radical  proletarians  can  teach 
us  how  not  to  be  afraid  to  love  our  fellow-men  and  thus 
to  know  wisdom  and  quiet,  fullest  joy. 


II 

PROLETARIANISM 


....      . 

Our  definition  of  the  proletariat  will  not  be  based 
on  a  detailed  acceptance  of  Marxian  prophecies, 
though  clearly,  in  spite  of  attacks  on  Marx  by  men 
like  Professor  Simkhovitch,  for  instance,  these  proph- 
ecies are  still  in  many  essentials  more  plausible  and  com- 
prehensive than  any  other  historical  formula  yet  pre- 
sented. To  put  it  more  accurately,  Marx  has  done 
more  to  organize  the  sciences  of  man  (even  after  we 
have  noted  the  recent  rapid  growth  of  psychology  and 
ethnology  far  beyond  his  ken)  and  he  has  done  more 
to  make  the  oceanic  labor  movement  self-conscious, 
that  is  to  say  rationally  experimental  (for  all  his  own 
quasi-Hegelian  dogmatizing)  than  any  other  genius 
before  or  since.  Neither  Marx  nor  Engels  desired 
the  following  generations  to  use  their  principles  in 
a  dogmatically  deductive  and  abstractionistic  spirit. 
It  is,  of  course,  a  simple  fact,  made  clear  by  none  more 
than  by  self-styled  "orthodox"  Marxists,  that  "ortho- 
dox" Marxism  is  as  impossible  to  define  with  any  hope 
of  general  agreement  as  "orthodox"  Christianity. 

[18] 


PROLETARIANISM 


Great  men  always  inspire  independent  followers  and 
intolerant  sectarians.  But  while  recognizing  the  es- 
sential plausibility  of  Marxism  we  must  not  gloss  over 
its  complications  of  detail  and  we  must  be  prepared 
to  restore  some  of  the  fine  programs  of  those  "Utopians" 
against  whom  Marx  and  Engels  girded.  Suffice  it  to 
note  here  that  in  the  Marxian  description  of  the  pro- 
letariat the  emphasis  on  the  complete  lack  of  property 
and  the  emphasis  on  the  lack  of  skill  are  not  to  be  con- 
strued now  as  essential  criteria,  though  they  may  be 
regarded  as  characteristic  of  a  large  and  growing  sec- 
tion of  any  industrial  populace.  Nor  should  we  con- 
sider "wages"  as  opposed  to  salary  or  even  income  to 
be  regarded  as  a  final  test  of  the  status  proletarian 
today,  though  we  may,  with  guild  socialists,  dis- 
tinguish between  "wages"  and  "pay"  for  the  purpose 
of  outlining  a  society  of  the  future.  Again  it  is  rather 
too  simple  now  to  speak  of  a  laborer  as  though  he 
were  merely  a  commodity,  though  this  is  ninety-nine 
one  hundredths  fact  and  it  is  still  the  naive  presup- 
position on  which  the  older  leaders  of  the  American 
Federation  of  Labor  have  built  their  whole  tactic,  and 
we  may  be  sure  that  laborers  will  always  remain  large- 
ly mere  commodities  until  they  declare  against  the 
wage-system. 

But  we  must  never  in  defining  the  proletariat  forget 
psychology.    Many  servant  girls,  for  all  their  depend- 

[19] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

ence,  their  decreasing  skill,  and  their  "wages,"  are,  as 
Kautsky  has  implied,  more  bourgeois  today  in  their 
irritation  against  radicals  than  some  masters  and  mis- 
tresses, some  school-teachers,  and  even  some  ministers 
and  lawyers.  A  few  days  ago  a  successful  business- 
man came  to  me  deeply  shocked  by  a  speech  made  to 
him  by  a  hotel  watchman.  This  watchman,  who 
worked  twelve  hours  a  day  at  a  pitiful  wage,  had  re- 
galed my  friend  with  a  most  naive  eulogy  of  American 
democracy  and  with  the  most  malignant  chauvinism. 
My  friend  was  shocked.  Who  then  was  the  bourgeois 
bowing  before  "the  sanctity  of  private  property?" 
Who  was  the  proletarian  championing  the  dignity  of  a 
full  personal  life? 

Without  dwelling  further  on  the  innumerable  but 
not  fatal  or  important  complications  which  arise  when 
we  consider  Marxian  formulae  and  definitions  today, 
we  will  venture  to  define  the  "proletariat"  as  that  class 
of  workers,  "manual"  or  "mental,"  which  has  become 
self-conscious  of  a  purpose  implying  nothing  less  than 
a  fundamental  and  world-wide  reconstructive  move- 
ment which  will  culminate  in  a  society  as  different 
from  ours  as  ours  differs  from  the  society  of  the  middle 
ages,  a  society  purged  of  morbid  "possessive  impulses" 
by  the  release  of  the  "creative  impulses."  Many  mem- 
bers of  the  "proletariat,"  as  conceived  by  Marx,  have, 
of  course,  as  yet  almost  as  little  of  this  consciousness 

[20] 


PROLETARIANISM 


as  they  had,  by  his  own  admission,  in  his  day.  They 
may  even  fear  the  ideals  which  self-consciousness 
evokes  or,  as  more  often  happens,  they  may  not  care 
to  contemplate  them  beyond  a  moment  of  vague  iras- 
cibility. The  psychoanalyst,  as  we  shall  see,  can  ex- 
plain this  for  us  and  do  much  to  remove  the  evil.  But 
a  rapidly  growing  number  of  these  wage-working  men 
and  women  and  children  do  already  contemplate  sound 
ideals  sustainedly,  and  with  their  growing  number  lies 
"the  hope  of  the  great  community." 

In  addition,  every  day  brings  from  other  classes, 
particularly  from  the  "intellectuals,"  men  and  wom- 
en who  are  willing  to  surrender  all  their  ambitions 
and  give  their  lives  to  the  great  reconstructive  move- 
ment. The  criteria  for  these  intellectuals  are:  do 
they  expect  to  learn  as  much  as  they  teach  when  they 
unite  with  handworkers?  are  they  willing  to  renounce 
all  crudely  individualistic  dreams  of  attaining  fame 
as  picturesque  martyrs,  as  Lord  Bountifuls,  or  as 
leaders  of  a  triumphal  procession?  Hitherto  these 
intellectuals  have  been  suspected  and  often  spurned 
by  the  more  militant  workers  whose  suspicions  have 
been  often  well-grounded.  But  a  mutual  understand- 
ing is  growing  daily  more  widespread,  more  rich- 
spirited,  more  loving,  more  hopeful.  Both  with  brain- 
workers  and  hand-workers,  therefore,  it  would  be  more 
accurate  to  speak  of  proletarianism  rather  than  of  a 

[21] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

proletariat.  For  though  the  economic  status  of  an  in- 
dividual is  a  tremendous  influence  in  fashioning  his 
state  of  mind,  yet  men  migrate  incessantly  today  not 
only  geographically,  but  economically.  And  a  very 
small,  but  growing,  number  of  economic  frontiersmen 
keep  clear  of  the  boundaries  and  bonds  of  all  present- 
day  classes  and  classifications.  We  could  say  most 
properly  that  all  these  human  beings,  migratory  work- 
ers, factory  workers,  stevedores,  engineers,  soldiers, 
school  teachers,  ministers  and  the  rest  are,  as  individu- 
als, inspired  by  varying  degrees  of  proletarianism,  are 
more  or  less  intensely  proletarian.  Let  us  remember 
that  the  young  science  of  social  psychology  is  emerging 
from  its  initial  "sterility"  largely  by  giving  up  the 
loose  talk  of  men  like  LeBon  about  the  mob-mind  or 
the  collective  mind,  and  by  analyzing  instead  the  vari- 
ous degrees  of  social-mindedness,  of  class-mindedness 
in  each  individual  more  as  Trotter  suggests.  We  may 
call  proletarians  "class-conscious"  not  in  the  sense  that 
they  believe  in  the  permanent  opposition  to  and  op- 
pression of  any  classes,  but  in  the  sense  that  they  have 
a  common  social  ideal  which  looks  to  the  breaking 
down  of  the  more  capriciously  traditionalistic,  stub- 
born, and  unjust  class-distinctions  that  are  brute  facts 
today.  In  their  own  proper  eagerness  to  insist  that 
the  reform  movement  of  revolution  is,  as  it  certainly  is, 
a  war  and  not  a  love-feast,  some  socialists  have  put  a 

[22] 


PROLETARIANISM 


too  inflexible  emphasis  on  classes,  and  may  too  easily 
degenerate  into  allegorical  simplification  of  life  for- 
getting that  the  goal  is  not  the  hate  of  persons,  though 
the  way  involves  the  hate  of  the  capitalistic  system,  the 
hate  of  hate  or  the  love  of  love. 

We  must  be  careful,  on  the  other  hand,  not  to  fall 
into  the  vague  dreams  of  a  monistic  society,  classless 
in  every  sense,  not  moved  by  strong  brotherly  love, 
but  mazed  by  literary  moonshine.  This  was  the  myo- 
pia of  socialism  when  it  was  too  close  to  left  wing 
Hegelianism.  This  book  will  be  politically  pluralistic. 
"Classless  society"  is  a  vague  mawkish  phrase. 

What  then  is  the  kind  of  class  the  "class-war" 
should  destroy?  When  we  use  the  word  class  as  a 
term  of  reproach,  let  us  denote  by  it  a  social  unit  of 
fortuitous  origin  which  tries  to  maintain  an  anti-social 
integrity  by  tyranny  and  false  reasoning,  by  what 
psychoanalysts  call  "repression"  and  "rationalization." 
A  "class,"  in  the  reproachful  sense,  is  exactly  what 
psychoanalysis  calls  in  the  individual  a  "complex."  In 
the  individual  a  "complex"  is  a  constellation  of  ideas 
and  emotions,  which  has  become  more  or  less  out  of 
harmony  with  the  rest  of  the  personality  and  which, 
as  an  unconscious  influence,  drives  the  rest  of  the  per- 
sonality to  violent  acts.  Apply  this  to  society  and  we 
may  say  that  an  anti-social  "class"  is  a  "complex." 
Now,  for  the  individual,  psychoanalysis  can  reconcile 

[23] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

a  "complex"  with  the  rest  of  the  personality  by  delving 
into  that  "unconscious"  part  of  mind  which  Dr.  G.  Stan- 
ley Hall  compares  to  the  enormous  area  of  iceburg 
under  water.  Psychoanalysis  can  bring  a  maddening 
complex  into  the  focus  of  consciousness,  and  so  harmon- 
ize all.  Revolutionary  socialism  strives  to  do  precisely 
the  same  thing  with  the  anti-social  "class,"  to  bring  it 
from  its  isolation,  [privilege  and  possessivism  or  parasi- 
tism] into  joyous  co-operation  with  all,  to  bring  it  out 
of  its  compromise  relation  with  the  rest,  a  neurasthe- 
nic or  morbid  relation  which  has  been  preserved  by  the 
erection  of  repressive  and  rationalizing  (sophistical) 
barriers. 

Without,  then,  limiting  ourselves  to  the  most  in- 
tense proletarianism,  and  without  forgetting  either  the 
psychological  fact  of  the  perpetual  waxing  and  waning 
of  its  intensity  or  the  economic  fact  (however  our  ideals 
may  rebel)  of  classes  which,  no  matter  how  blurred  in 
outline  and  constantly  changing,  will  persist  for  some 
time  to  come,  but  trying  always  to  balance  ourselves  by 
keeping  both  the  psychological  and  economico-histori- 
cal  views  simultaneously  in  mind,  we  will  round  out  our 
definition  to  specify  as  the  proletariat  that  class  of 
workers,  "manual"  or  "mental,"  which  has  become 
earnestly  self-conscious  and  sustainedly  active  in  the 
fulfillment  of  a  purpose  which  is  nothing  less  than  a 
fundamental  and  world-wide  reconstructive  movement. 

[24] 


PROLETARIANISM 


This  proletariat  will  create  a  society  'without  fortuitous 
classes  and,  therefore,  more  rationally  sensitive  than 
any  preceding  society  to  relative  merits,  their  variations 
in  degree  and  kind,  and  society's  vital  need  of  their  full 
recognition,  a  society  as  different  from  ours  of  the  mo- 
ment as  ours  differs  from  the  society  of  the  middle  ages, 
a  society  purged  of  morbid  "possessive  impulses"  by 
the  release  of  the  "creative  impulses."  What  that 
society  will  be  like  we  can  suggest  in  considerable  detail 
as  we  go  on,  but  only  suggest.  For  no  one  can  prophecy 
it  in  detail.  For  if  our  thought  is  complete,  it  must 
reach  a  scientific  climax.  And  science  does  not  really 
prophecy,  it  forecasts  tentatively  and  then  works  ex- 
perimentally with  details  which  it  controls  in  ever- 
increasing,  but  cautiously  increased,  numbers.  The 
proletarian  movement  is  itself  becoming,  we  may  hope 
to  prove,  more  and  more  scientific,  an  enormous  pano- 
ramic experiment  changing  under  our  very  gaze 
its  old  trial  and  error  methods  for  extraordinar- 
ily comprehensive,  epical  self-conscious  methods. 
Finally,  we  .may  hope  to  prove  that  the  proletarian 
movement  is  becoming  more  competent  than  any  other 
social  current  to  nourish  whatever  higher  values  of 
life  will  stand  the  test  of  air  and  sunlight  and  reason, 
and  to  beget  in  addition  new  and  congruous  values  of 
unimaginable  grandeur. 

The  task  of  the  proletarian  movement  is  still  funda- 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

mentally  educational.  It  is  emerging  more  and  more 
as  a  movement  essentially  religious,  critical,  scientific 
and  artistic,  claiming  to  cherish  the  truly  spiritual 
values,  old,  new  and  unborn,  with  more  discrimination, 
with  more  open-mindedness,  and  with  a  more  vivid 
hope  than  do  any  of  the  social  institutions  (like  the 
church  and  the  college),  which  have  been  so  long  ac- 
credited as  the  custodians  of  things  spiritual.  The 
method  of  the  labor  movement  is  genuinely  discipli- 
nary, as  opposed  to  the  pseudo-disciplinary  coercion  of 
the  "Servile  State"  which  threatens  us.  The  end  of 
proletarianism  is  to  discover  the  individual  value  for 
society  of  every  living  man,  or,  more  properly,  to 
create  a  group  of  individuals  who  will  make  of  the 
State  an  instrument  and  not  a  fetich.  This  is  also  the 
end  of  an  essentially  liberal  education  as  opposed  to 
that  traditionalistic  education  which  aims  to  produce 
a  mediocre  mass  of  useful  slaves  in  the  vocational 
schools  and  business  colleges,  and  to  produce  a  tinsel 
minority  of  useless,  "cultured"  gentlemen  trained  for 
"leadership"  in  the  universities.  The  labor  movement 
is  quite  properly  described  as  overwhelmingly  social- 
istic in  tendency.  But  it  is  no  longer  necessary  or  in- 
telligent to  point  a  naive  antithesis  between  "socialism" 
and  "individualism."  It  is  now  a  truism  that  the  only 
individualism  which  enlightened  socialists  oppose  is 
sentimental  or  violent  anarchy,  on  the  one  hand,  and, 


PROLETARIANISM 


on  the  other,  the  mad-cap  laissez-faire  of  the  tradi- 
tional bourgeois  State.  Socialism  recognizes  that  many 
individualists,  even  of  these  old-fashioned  types,  have, 
by  their  merciless  monopolistic  competition,  done  great 
service  to  the  world  in  socializing  within  the  nation 
the  means  of  production,  even  while  they  have,  through 
improper  methods  of  appropriation  and  uncritical  laws 
of  tenure,  retained  a  minority  anarchy  of  control. 
Indeed,  socialism  freely  admits  that  even  the  in- 
ternational activities  of  these  old-fashioned  individual- 
ists had  uses  in  the  same  direction.  But  socialism  holds 
that  the  trial  and  error  methods  of  this  older  individ- 
ualism tend,  with  pathetic  senility,  to  remain  the  same 
old  childish,  tragic,  laissez-faire  applied  now  with  far- 
cical inappropriateness  to  the  interdependent  races  of 
all  continents.  It  is  obvious  that  a  more  scientific,  a 
more  rational  method  of  internationalizing  the  means 
of  production  is  desirable  if  we  still  have  any  reverence 
for  human  life  and  if  man  still  has  any  really  creative 
vision.  Orthodox  statesmen  have  done  nothing  more 
original  than  to  transfer  the  ideals  of  the  Manchester 
School  of  economics  for  execution  to  the  mighty  am- 
phitheatre of  the  orbis  terrarum.  The  American  bour- 
geoisie has  had  such  a  larger  field  for  international 
predation  that  it  has  come  very  slowly  to  an  under- 
standing of  the  philosophy  of  international  laissez- 
jaire,  coupled  with  intranational  paternalism.  Some 

[27] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

of  our  reactionaries  are  eager  enough  now  to  adopt 
this  sinister  philosophy.  But  we  have  reason  to  hope 
that  American  farmers  of  the  Middle  West,  American 
liberal  journalists,  and  the  rank  and  file  of  organized 
American  labor  will  influence  the  no  longer  apathetic, 
but  still  provincial,  public  profoundly  and  intimately 
enough  to  exercise  its  superstitions  and  save  it  from 
exploitation  by  reactionaries.  The  small  minorities  of 
big  financial  capitalists  might  be  forced  out  of  their 
equivocations  but  for  the  fact  that  their  small-salaried 
clerical  slaves  in  local  government  offices,  in  business 
offices,  in  newspaper  offices,  in  many  churches  and 
schools,  and  the  small  capitalists  and  shop-keepers  are 
subject  to  mob-contagions  because  they  have  a  deadly 
fear  of  what  we  have  described  as  the  point  of  view  of 
the  critical  intellectual.  Similar  conditions  prevail  in 
large  areas  of  the  laboring  classes.  But  here  there 
emerges  more  and  more  youthfulness  of  outlook  and  a 
hope  both  honest  and  spacious.  It  is  the  task  of  prole- 
tarianism  to  inspire  to  self-discipline  and  liberality  of 
view  a  larger  and  larger  number  of  people  wherever 
they  are  gathered  together  by  economic  impulsions,  to 
help  them  to  see  through  the  lingering  primitive  taboos 
in  modern  civilization  and  to  develop  an  austere,  ra- 
tional immunity  from  mob-contagion.  The  task  of 
proletarianism  is,  therefore,  fundamentally  educa- 
tional. 

[28] 


Ill 

RELIGION 

To  call  any  proletarian  revolutionary  movement 
religious  may  seem  perverse  to  the  respectable,  and 
crass  to  some  of  the  revolutionists  themselves,  although 
M.  Georges  Sorel  (in  the  brave  days  when  he  wrote  as 
a  stimulating  prophet  of  radicalism)  has  already  em- 
phasized some  religious  tendencies  in  syndicalism.  We 
must  endeavor  to  meet  all  charges  by  describing  first 
the  so-called  "materialism"  of  the  militant  proletariat, 
and  by  then  describing  and  comparing  what  seems  to 
be  essential  and  common  in  all  religions. 

The  use  of  the  word  "materialism"  by  the  revolu- 
tionary laborers  is  simple,  simple  in  an  admirable  sense 
of  the  word.  It  is  silly  to  quarrel  with  the  word;  for, 
though  it  is  as  vague  as  the  word  "spiritual"  which  is 
fashionable  in  the  "upper"  classes,  it  is  not  half  as  de- 
ceptive to  the  proletariat  as  is  the  word  "spiritual"  to 
the  bourgeoisie.  It  has  been  of  genuine  value  for  prole- 
tarian purposes,  and  it  is  really  very  expressive.  Some 
new  "materialism"  is  forever  rising  to  purge  some  shal- 
low "idealism"  and  to  be  itself  in  turn  destroyed.  Its 

[29] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

frequent  reincarnations  are  certainly  due  to  the  fact  that 
it  is,  after  all,  the  most  straightforward,  if  not  the  most 
profound  of  metaphysical  views.  Materialism,  as  a 
rough  and  ready  metaphysics,  fills  some  scientific 
savants  and  some  proletarian  agitators  with  an  invigor- 
ating sense  of  freedom  from  all  considerations  that 
interfere  with  their  own  cherished  faiths  and  aspira- 
tions, whether  these  be  in  relation  to  chemistry,  biology 
or  the  conflict  of  labor  and  capital.  Clear  the  field  ab- 
solutely of  gods,  clear  the  field  of  those  haunting  be- 
liefs rephrased  in  dialectic  which  are  but  the  crystal 
maze  with  which  the  philosopher  hypnotizes  his  prac- 
tical faculties,  clear  the  field  of  all  these  phantas- 
magoria, thinks  the  materialist,  and  you  can  get  down 
to  business.  Now,  if  you  are  a  professor  of  physical 
chemistry  your  business  may  be  all  locked  up  in  some 
dim  laboratory  bristling  with  wires,  belts  and  batteries 
most  alarming  to  the  visitor  who  entrusts  himself  into 
your  hands  as  he  might  commend  himself  to  God.  Or 
you  may  be  a  radical  laborer  who  would  arouse  your 
comrades  against  your  rapacious  employers.  In  either 
case  you  think  at  first  that  you  don't  want  to  be  bothered 
with  God.  Yet  in  such  a  point  of  view  one  may  find, 
after  all,  a  social  faith  and  a  religious  ardor  of  concen- 
tration which  is  far  more  inspiriting  than  that  middle- 
class  positivism  which  prevails  in  the  respectable 
strata  of  society.  Materialism  is  simple  because  it  is 

[30] 


RELIGION 

earnest  and  because  it  is  far  less  equivocal  than  bour- 
geois positivism,  whic'h,  on  the  basis  of  an  utterly  un- 
sound division  of  labor,  sends  its  wives  and  children 
to  church,  but  itself  deserts  the  counting-house  only 
for  the  billiard  table  and  the  golf  links,  a  positivism 
which  professes  Christianity  and  trusts  that  its  wives 
and  children  may  bargain  sufficiently  with  that  remote 
Unknowable  to  insure  salvation,  while  it  makes  sure  of 
the  bread  and  butter — and  the  French  pastry.  No 
profession  on  the  part  of  the  middle-class  positivist  be- 
gins to  move  one  like  the  superb  manifesto  with  which 
Tyndall,  on  the  full  crest  of  the  achievement  of  nine- 
teenth century  science,  expressed  cautiously,  yet  cour- 
ageously his  materialistic  expectations: 

"Is  there  not  a  temptation  to  close  to  some  extent  with  Lucretius 
when  he  affirms  that  'nature  is  seen  to  do  all  things  spontaneously  of 
herself,  without  the  meddling  of  the  Gods!'  or  with  Bruno  when 
he  declares  that  matter  is  not  'that  mere  empty  capacity  which  philoso- 
phers have  pictured,  but  the  universal  mother  who  brings  forth  all 
things  as  the  iruit  of  her  own  womb  ?'  Believing  as  I  do  in  the  con- 
tinuity of  nature,  I  cannot  stop  abruptly  where  our  microscopes  cease 
to  be  of  use.  By  an  intellectual  necessity  I  cross  the  boundary  of  the 
experimental  evidence,  and  discern  in  that  matter  which  we,  in  our 
ignorance  of  its  latent  powers,  and  notwithstanding  our  professed 
reverence  for  its  Creator,  have  hitherto  covered  with  opprobrium, 
the  promise  and  potency  of  all  terrestrial  life." 

Of  course,  this  is  only  attacking  anthropomorphism 
with  a  neo-anthropomorphism,  that  is  to  say  with  a  new 
personification  of  "nature."  We  may  glance  here  at 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

the  logical  difficulties  of  atheism  as  we  note  its  difficul- 
ties for  the  imagination  in  Prometheus  Unbound, 
where  Shelley  has  to  create  Demogorgon  in  order  to 
destroy  Jove.  But  these  metaphysical  verbalisms  are 
unproductive  for  development  at  this  point. 

For  our  immediate  purposes  we  are  more  interested 
in  the  unacademic  materialist,  the  man  who  carries  our 
trunks,  who  builds  the  long  roads  of  California,  who 
mines  the  copper  in  Arizona  or  Montana,  the  iron  in 
Minnesota,  who  works  on  our  ranches  or  in  our  forests 
a  few  months  and  is  then  cast  forth  by  our  thoughtless 
society  to  lead  a  nomadic  life  during  the  unfruitful  sea- 
sons or  to  hibernate  in  the  moral  contagions  of  city 
lodgings  while  we  remark  with  utter  falsity  that  "there 
is  always  room  at  the  top"  and  that  this  is  "the  land 
of  equal  opportunity."  Now  this  unacademic  material- 
ist may  be  also  clinging  desperately  to  his  powers  of 
reflection  long  enough  to  wonder  why  his  brother  was 
born  with  a  silver  spoon  in  his  mouth,  while  he  was 
born  with  a  pick-axe  so  invitingly  near  his  elbow.  He 
is  naturally  inclined  to  make  short  work  with  God  who 
seems  to  him  to  have  been  emphatically  a  workman  of 
the  most  unskilled  variety.  He  would  naturally  clear 
the  field  for  what  is  to  him  of  supreme  importance, 
the  "class-struggle,"  in  which  the  oppressed,  like  rest- 
less molecules,  fight  their  way  to  some  happier  union, 
or  like  flowers  force  their  way  up  through  the  earth 

[32] 


RELIGION 

and  through  the  decaying  plants  of  tradition,  of  full- 
fed,  degenerate  oppressors,  to  air  and  sunlight, 

Capitalism,  asserts  the  militant  proletarian,  has 
played  its  religious  shell-game  long  enough.  Capital- 
ism has  told  us  that  Christ  exalted  poverty,  that  God 
rewards  obedience.  The  Bible,  however,  appears  to 
be  the  book  of  the  capitalist,  not  ours,  because  from  it 
the  capitalist  feeds  us  with  empty  words,  while  he 
gluts  his  own  highly  organized  senses  by  means  which 
outrage  every  utterance  in  the  Scriptures.  Therefore, 
we  will  sweep  the  field  of  capitalism's  phantom  God 
and  phantom  Satan,  which  are  conjured  before  us  to 
keep  us  in  a  state  of  servile  content  or  fear  in  peace,  to 
make  us  organized  beasts  in  war.  We  will  spurn  aside 
these  obstructions  in  order  that  we  may  struggle  freely 
side  by  side  with  the  only  friends  we  know,  our  fellow- 
workers,  against  the  only  enemies  we  know,  our  sleek 
and  hypocritical  employers.  Thus  we  make  the  situa- 
tion simple,  coherent,  and  vivid  to  all  sincere  human 
beings.  And  in  due  time,  if  we  in  turn  come  to  op- 
press some  class  that  rises  beneath  us  (a  situation  which 
our  atheism  and  our  sincerity  compel  us  to  admit  as 
quite  possible),  then  out  of  the  rain  of  atoms  and  the 
wind  of  energies  let  the  oppressed  sweep  us  into  the 
dust  heap  just  as  we  now  bend  ourselves  to  overcome 
our  oppressors. 

We  need  scarcely  note  that  this  expression  of  pro- 

[33] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

letarian  materialism  is  still  tainted  with  something  of 
the  laissez-faire  of  the  master-class.  But  the  moment- 
ous thing  to  note  is  that,  though  there  has  never  been 
an  act  of  proletarian  violence  that  was  not  inspired  by 
an  act  of  bourgeois  violence,  there  have  been  and 
there  are  in  increasing  numbers  proletarian  deeds  of  a 
humaneness  quite  new  in  the  world  that  we  know. 
Some  of  these  we  shall  examine  presently.  For  the 
moment  let  two  examples  hint  at  a  generalization. 

A  young  Swedish  friend  of  the  author's  had  occasion 
to  attend  many  meetings  of  laborers  and  employers  in 
Sweden  during  the  general  strike  of  1909.  At  every 
labor  meeting  he  heard  the  laborers  say:  "Remember, 
comrades,  the  public  thinks  us  ruffians.  Prove  to  them 
that  we  are  gentlemen.  However  great  your  humilia- 
tion, resist  no  one."  At  every  employers'  meeting  he 
heard :  "Starve  the  hounds.  Now  is  the  time  to  make 
them  crawl  at  our  feet."  A  recent  number  of  The 
Weekly  People  translates  a  speech  by  the  Finnish  pro- 
letarian, Yrjo  Maekelin.  Yrjo  Maekelin,  who  was 
later  nearly  lynched  by  the  bourgeois  White  Guard 
(lovers  of  law  and  order  and  German  princes),  spoke 
as  follows:  "He  who  considers  it  his  duty  to  take  up 
weapons  for  the  freedom  of  the  people,  must  himself 
be  without  blemish,  free  from  low  instincts  and  of  a 
strong  and  noble  character.  Morally  he  must  be  su- 
perior to  his  opponent  in  order  to  be  able  to  keep  the 

[34] 


RELIGION 

red  flag  of  the  Revolution  clean."  No  psychoanalyst 
could  more  austerely  insist  that  he  who  has  not  dis- 
covered and  sublimated  his  own  complexes  will  never 
truly  help,  but  will,  on  the  contrary,  be  running  away 
from  himself  into  "compensatory  activities,"  blind 
"reforming"  more  injurious  to  his  fellows  than  healing. 
Sympathetic  readers  will  recall  how  in  a  recent  num- 
ber of  The  Dial  Professor  Franz  Boas  marshalled  his 
crushing  ethnological  erudition  to  prove  that  from  "the 
common  people  are  expected  humbleness,  mercy  and  all 
those  qualities  that  we  consider  humane,"  that  the  "in- 
terest" of  "a  social  class — set  off  from  the  mass  of  the 
people — requires  that  its  members  should  not  perform 
menial  occupations"  and  is,  therefore,  more  "warped 
by  the  unconscious  control  of  tradition,"  that  "the  de- 
tails of  the  right  solution  of  a  problem  can  always  be 
found  by  the  masses,"  that  "the  ideal  that  they  want  to 
see  realized  is  a  safer  guide  for  our  conduct  than  the 
ideal  of  the  intellectual  group  that  stands  under  the  ban 
of  a  tradition  that  dulls  their  feeling  for  the  needs  of 
the  day."  Even  the  crudest  proletarian  materialism  is 
more  religious  than  the  so-called  idealism  of  the  master- 
class, because  of  the  passionate  sincerity  and  the  readi- 
ness for  fundamental  reconstruction  with  which  it  faces 
the  great  problem  on  which  the  religion  of  today  must 
focus — the  problem  of  the  relations  of  man  to  his 
fellow-men,  the  deepest  mystery  of  our  age,  a  problem 

[35] " 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

which  the  bourgeoisie  professes  to  face  with  a  so-called 
"Practical  Christianity"  which  is  neither  practical  nor 
Christian,  but  which  is  canned  sociology  and  faltering 
ethics  without  an  atom  of  bold  religious  speculation 
and  without  a  tremor  towards  a  really  courageous  sur- 
gery of  social  ills,  a  mere  quack-salve  to  allay  those  ir- 
ritations of  the  skin  which  are  symptomatic  of  deep 
organic  disorders. 

Out  of  the  fierce  materialism  of  even  the  crudest 
version  of  the  proletarian  revolt  there  is  rising  a  re- 
vised religion.  These  rebels  .scoff  at  ethics  and  talk 
incessantly  of  economic  determinants,  of  material 
causes  (whatever  "causes"  may  mean),  of  the  irresis- 
tible demand  of  the  stomach  for  bread  which  roars 
down  the  demand  of  the  soul  for  poetry  and  for  silks. 
But  from  an  ethical  point  of  view  even  their  most 
cast-iron  versions  of  economic  determinism  are  funda- 
mentally new  systems  of  ethics.  And  crude  as  the  worst 
of  them  are  they  are  far  more  living,  far  more  just  than 
the  moral  sophism  of  those  retired  presidents,  journal- 
ists, business-men,  ministers,  lawyers  and  teachers  who 
try  to  refute  them  with  ignorant  abuse.  The  pro- 
letarian economic  interpretation  of  politics  is  less  often 
narrow  and  simple  than  it  is  a  detailed  description  of 
political  action  far  more  complex  and  far  more  con- 
versant with  facts  than  the  abstract  and  romantic  inter- 
pretations which  college  professors  learn  by  rote  from 

[36] 


RELIGION 

partisan  newspapers  and  loosely  imaginative,  elegantly 
written  books  wherein  nations  are  made  to  perform  like 
the  allegorical  puppets  of  a  fifteenth  century  morality 
play.  The  fiery  progressivism  of  the  workers  and  their 
fearless  consideration  of  all  the  social  mysteries  give 
them  far  more  right  than  any  others  except  the  most 
consecrated  and  daring  scientists  to  say  with  Royce  that 
"our  fellows  are  known  to  be  real,  and  to  have  their 
own  inner  life,  because  they  are  for  each  of  us  the  end- 
less treasury  of  more  ideas."  Out  of  the  materialism  of 
the  militant  workers  is  rising  much  idealism;  for  they 
know  that  "everything  ideal  has  a  natural  basis"  and 
their  emotions,  their  hopes,  their  widening  sympathies, 
their  reason  tell  them  that  at  least  some  natural  things 
have  "an  ideal  development."  The  militant  proletariat 
has  gained,  through  amazing  sacrifices,  trenchant  sin- 
cerity, and  innumerable  services  to  humanitarian  re- 
form the  supreme  right  to  quote  as  Credo  a  beautiful 
sentence  which  William  James  wrote  about  the  essence 
of  religion:  "If  any  phrase  could  gather  its  universal 
message,  that  phrase  would  be  'All  is  not  vanity  in  this 
Universe,  whatever  the  appearances  may  suggest.' ' 
Let  any  one  who  doubts  the  sincerity  and  the  sacri- 
fices of  the  militant  proletariat  read  the  following, 
which  is  but  one  of  an  increasing  army  of  tributes 
from  men  outside  the  proletariat  (as  more  narrowly 
defined)  who  have  studied  labor-tactics  with  an  open 

[37] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

mind.     Mr.  John   Graham   Brooks  supplies  us  with 
these  anecdotes  and  comments: 

"With  cynical  hilarity  a  business  friend  has  just  read  to  me  a  pro- 
posal by  Mr.  Debs  to  raise  at  once  $500,000  for  the  approaching 
socialist  campaign.  'There  you  have  it,  like  a  staged  farce.  The 
starved  millions,  living  on  the  margin  of  want,  are  to  paint  the  country 
red  with  two  million  votes  for  Debs  and  Seidel.  Not  a  nickel  from 
the  big  interests,  no  blackmailing  of  corporations,  but  the  whole  half 
million  subscribed  by  the  starving,  downtrodden  working  class.'  'And 
this,'  he  adds,  'is  but  an  item.  They  pour  thousands  of  dollars  into 
Lawrence  and  a  dozen  other  struck  towns  at  the  same  time.  They 
have  just  been  buncoed  out  of  a  quarter  of  a  million  to  free  the 
McNamaras.  They  are  paying  for  costly  conventions,  hundreds 
of  lectures  and  a  very  expensive  press.  Doesn't  such  penury  wring 
the  heart?' 

"In  this  sportive  mood  he  filled  in  other  features  of  the  comedy, 
ending  with  the  annihilating  phrase,  'they  must  be  destitute  of 
humor.' 

"This  gentleman  had  been  telling  a  great  deal  of  truth,  but  by 
no  means  all  of  it  or  the  most  important  part  of  it.  These  objects 
of  his  lampooning  are  raising  far  larger  funds  than  he  knew.  They 
are  doing  it  all  over  the  world,  in  countries  where  the  purchasing 
power  of  the  year's  income  is  far  lower  than  in  the  United  States. 
They  have  for  years  been  doing  it  on  a  scale  which  most  well-to-do 
people  would  consider  insane  or  criminal.  The  propertied  classes 
very  generally  shuffle  and  kick  at  ordinary  taxes,  but  with  voluntary 
devotion  millions  of  working  men  and  women  bring  their  earned 
money  to  support  an  idea.  They  are  not  doing  this  in  spurts  of 
enthusiasm,  but  with  tireless  persistency,  sustained  by  a  great  faith. 

"Many  of  them  pay  this  price  for  what  they  know  never  can  be 

[38] 


RELIGION 

theirs.  On  a  bench  by  the  Capitol  in  Richmond,  Virginia,  I  sat 
one  night  after  a  socialist  meeting  with  an  old  man  who  had  seen 
about  all  one  could  see  of  service  in  the  Confederate  cause.  He  had 
for  years  given  himself  to  build  up  a  socialist  sentiment  in  that 
community.  'I  shall  not  live,'  he  said,  'to  see  even  the  beginning  of  it. 
But  it  is  a  great  cause.'  He  was  one  of  an  army,  far  greater  than 
the  South  sent  to  the  field,  who  know  that  no  extra  penny  can  come 
to  them,  but  they  bring  their  offering  just  the  same. 

"  'I  haven't  had  a  political  thrill,'  said  a  teacher  to  Mr.  Brooks, 
'except  of  disgust,  since  those  great  days  of  my  youth  (the  days  of  the 
Civil  War).  Two  bright  boys  in  my  Civics  class  began  to  bring 
me  accounts  of  what  local  socialists  were  doing.  I  had  read  three  or 
four  socialist  books  of  the  better  sort,  but  thought  of  them  as  stimulat- 
ing and  harmless  Utopias.  I  then  set  to  work  on  the  local  programs. 
I  was  surprised  to  find  many  of  my  old  pupils  and  teachers  conse- 
crated to  the  movement,  though  many  of  them  held  positions  which 
kept  them  silent.  It  has  brought  to  me  in  my  closing  years  the  great 
emotions  of  1860.  I  had  come  to  believe  that  concentrating  wealth 
had  so  fastened  upon  our  political  life  as  to  lead  us  straight  toward 
disaster.  We  may  go  there  still,  but  this  socialism  has  restored  my 
hope.  It  has  made  me  believe  there  are  moral  resources  in  the 
community  and  intellectual  capacities  among  common  people  which 
will  save  us,  if  we  are  sane  enough  to  recognize  them  and  work  with 
them.' 

"The  I.  W.  W.  movement  is  strictly  a  revolutionary  uprising 
against  that  part  of  the  present  order,  which  is  known  as  capitalism. 
Its  ground-swell  is  felt  in  many  very  different  types  of  nationality. 
Like  every  revolution  it  attracts  the  most  unselfish  and  courageous, 
together  with  the  self-seeking  and  semi-criminal.  Garibaldi's  famous 

[39] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

'Thousand'  had  in  it  as  large  a  percentage  of  this  latter  class  as  the 
I.  W.  W.  at  its  worst.  The  King  of  Naples  tried  to  treat  Gari- 
baldi's followers  like  'bums.'  It  proved  a  most  damaging  error,  be- 
cause these  revolutionists  began  to  excite  powerful  sympathy.  It  was 
a  sympathy  that  soon  passed  into  political  action,  as  many  of  our  own 
great  strikes  pass  into  politics,  forcing  employers  to  yield  to  a  new  and 
hated  influence.  As  the  revolt  of  labor  increases,  popular  sympathy 
acts  through  politicians  whom,  if  they  are  gaining  against  us,  we  call 
'demagogues.' 

"At  the  Lawrence  strike,  I  saw  a  newcomer  so  fresh  from  the  Old 
World  that  he  tripped  awkwardly  in  almost  every  English  sentence. 
But  he  was  aglow  with  beneficence.  He  said  that  he  had  been  in 
eight  different  countries.  'Always  it  is  the  same.  Everywhere  it  is 
the  one  home.' ' 

This  is  the  veritable  elan  vital  of  religion.  It  is  ab- 
solutely demonstrable  that,  despite  the  deceptive  rise  of 
the  wage-scale,  the  rich  are  getting  irresponsibly  richer 
while  the  poor  are  not  gaining  ground  in  any  fair  pro- 
portion. The  bourgeois  cynic  may  trace  proletarian 
religion  to  this  sordid  origin.  The  proletarians  will 
frankly  agree.  But  the  true  artist-critic-scientist  will 
only  revere  the  more  profoundly  the  religious  fer- 
vor of  the  proletariat  when  he  sees  its  natural  or- 
igins and  its  ideal  development.  And  if  we  look 
back  historically  over  the  various  outbursts  of  the 
religious  elan  we  shall  feel  confirmed  of  the  authen- 
ticity of  proletarian  religion.  Let  us  remember  in  this 
connection  some  comprehensive  phrases  by  Mr.  R.  R. 

[40] 


RELIGION 

Marett:  "Psychologically  regarded  .  .  .  the  function 
of  religion  is  to  restore  men's  confidence  when  it  is 
shaken  by  crises.  Men  do  not  seek  crisis;  they  would 
always  away  from  it  if  they  could.  Crisis  seeks  them; 
and,  whereas  the  feebler  folk  are  ready  to  succumb,  the 
bolder  spirits  face  it.  Religion  is  the  facing  of  the  un- 
known. It  is  the  courage  in  it  that  brings  the  comfort." 
The  founders  of  great  religions  are  invariably  non- 
conformists. It  is  not  likely  that  those  who  are  to  save 
religion  from  certain  perversions  which  threaten  it  to- 
day are  going  to  consummate  their  redemptive  work  in 
the  conformity  which  toryism  demands.  No,  conserva- 
tives of  today  are  fond  of  religious  institutions,  but  not 
of  real  religion.  Religion  has  primitive  associations 
with  fear;  with  critical  minds  it  sublimates  fear;  but 
with  conservatives  it  remains  enslaved  by  what  Freud 
calls  the  "censor-wish"  and  can  be  expressed,  therefore, 
only  in  pseudo-social  terms.  Tories  have  never  quick- 
ened a  drooping  religion  back  into  radiant  life  and  they 
have  never  made  a  new  one.  Institutions  are  to  society 
what  habits  are  to  the  individual.  Anti-social  "class"  in- 
stitutions are,  as  Dr.  Burrow  is  demonstrating,  exactly 
what  the  physiological  "symptoms"  of  hysteria  are  in 
the  individual,  a  subtle  and  roundabout  way  of  preserv- 
ing a  neurosis  and  tyrannizing  over  others  with  fear  and 
perversity  of  one's  own.  Healthy  social  institutions 
may  be  very  useful;  they  may  emancipate  men  from 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

routine  for  higher  activities;  but  they  are  at  best  only 
like  the  spinal  column,  not  like  the  fine  cortex  of  the 
brain.  If  they  are  mistaken  for  the  higher  activities 
they  are  likely  to  be  very  imperious.  A  people  ridden 
by  institutions  is  like  a  man  overwhelmed  by  an  intri- 
cate but  prosaic  routine,  by  a  precise  but  mazeful  series 
of  reflex  actions.  All  this  is  as  true  of  religious  as  of 
political  and  educational  institutions.  Radicals  are  the 
only  makers  of  religions.  Radicals  also  make  living  in- 
stitutions of  the  emancipating  variety,  well  fitted  to  give 
free  outlet  to  religious  enthusiasm.  Laborers  (as  we 
shall  see  in  abundant  detail  as  we  examine  their  seeth- 
ing, flexible,  quarreling,  experimental  unions)  are  just 
beginning  to  mould  such  living  institutions.  Conserva- 
tives talk  much  about  religion,  but  often  cling  to  an  in- 
stitutionalized mummy  without  realizing  at  all  that  the 
soul  has  fled.  It  gives  them  a  sense  of  security.  Today 
some  States  have  become  religious  institutions  in  which 
many  "routineers"  find  their  semblance  of  religious 
satisfaction,  and  out  of  which  they  can  always  conjure 
tribal  gods  to  lend  ferocity  to  their  wars.  Everywhere 
the  activities  of  conservatives  are  singularly  perverse 
just  now.  Conservatives  at  present  are  far  more  violent 
in  words  and  deeds  than  radicals. 

But  vital  religion  is  never  irrationally  or  violently  co- 
ercive for,  as  Mr.  Marett  points  out,  "the  courage  in- 
volved in  all  live  religion  normally  coexists  with  a  cer- 

[42] 


RELIGION 

tain  modesty  or  humility,"  a  humility  wholesomely  pro- 
portionate. Religion,  then,  we  may  define  as  the  attitude 
of  facing  with  exultant  but  humble  courage  the  un- 
known, with  the  faith  that  "all  is  not  vanity  in  the  uni- 
verse," with  the  joyous  confidence  that  "everything 
natural"  has  a  potential  "ideal  development."  Every- 
body is  religious.  But  only  "bolder  spirits,"  as  Mr. 
Marett  shows,  are  markedly,  sustainedly  and  unequivo- 
cally religious.  For  these  bolder  spirits  there  seems  to 
be  no  conflict  between  religion  and  science.  That  does 
not  mean  that  science  confirms  all  of  our  given  myths. 
It  may  destroy  them — and  so  emancipate  religion, 
which  goes  on  like  a  herald  to  lure  us  to  new  crises,  new 
unknowns  to  experiment  with.  But  religion  is  the  vital 
force.  In  primitive  days  it  inspires  an  Indian  to  dance 
rain  for  his  crops.  His  activities  are  not  sordid  or 
crassly  utilitarian.  They  are  full  of  the  wonder  and 
beauty,  as  well  as  of  the  homelier  desires  of  life. 
Criticism  and  science  discover  a  better  way  of  dealing 
with  crops  and  so  fulfill  religion.  Religion,  thereupon, 
does  not  die.  It  urges  or  beckons  on  the  true  adven- 
turer to  a  new  frontier.  Today  that  frontier  is  the 
mystery  of  man's  social  relations  and  the  hope  that 
urges  us  is  the  democratic  hope.  The  "preconscious 
or  the  nest  instinct"  hints  of  its  immortality  through  our 
unquenchable  yearning  towards  equality.  We  know 
something  of  the  rational  control  of  nature,  but  very 

[43] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

little  of  the  rational  control  of  society.  The  labor 
movement  is  facing  this  problem  with  a  fine  religious 
courage  and  humility,  but  not  with  that  cowardly  pas- 
sivity which  capitalism  would  prescribe  as  the  proper 
humility  for  the  worker.  The  labor  movement  has 
made  also  a  very  searching  criticism  and  arrived  at  a 
very  radical  hypothesis  (the  abolition  of  the  wage- 
system)  ;  it  has  initiated  and  carried  very  far  a  cam- 
paign of  genuinely  scientific  experimentation  that  is 
astonishingly  resourceful  (the  varying  union-structures 
and  the  varying  union-functions).  But  the  basis  of  the 
labor  movement  is  in  a  great  new  religion,  often  vague 
but  always  vivid,  which  thrills  at  the  mention  of 
"solidarity"  as  Christians  once  thrilled,  hundreds  of 
years  ago,  at  the  mention  of  universal  brotherhood, 
which  inspires  proletarians,  as  it  inspired  primitive 
Christians,  to  that  militant  or  paradoxical  "non-resist- 
ance" which  remakes  huge  societies. 


[44] 


IV 
CRITICISM 

But  let  us  beware,  as  all  profoundly  militant  prole- 
tarians will  beware,  of  allowing  our  religious  elan,  un- 
critically, to  go  its  Dionysiac  way  to  the  extent  of  lull- 
ing in  us  the  purifying  spirit  of  Cartesian  doubts.  Un- 
less we  are  chastened  by  some  calamity  or  unless  we 
keep  our  reason  strong  this  elan  will  betray  us.  It  was 
partly  because  of  an  uncriticized  religious  faith  in  the 
omnipotence  of  the  so-called  "natural  sciences"  that 
while  we  studied  the  scientific  control  of  gases,  of  soils, 
the  "predictability"  of  the  appearance  of  comets  and 
eclipses,  the  Brownian  movement  of  physical  particles, 
the  behavior  of  paramecia,  we  left  all  control  of  masses 
of  men  to  brilliant  but  irresponsible  leaders  nourished 
on  historical  superstitions,  hemmed  in  by  sluggish  and 
pedantic  laws,  harassed  by  short-sighted  financial  capi- 
talists, who  are  "efficient"  in  their  organization  of 
railroads  or  oil-mines  in  Africa,  Mexico  or  China,  but 
who  are  like  adolescents  learning  how  to  gamble  when 
they  try  to  forecast  those  awful  death-locks  of  races 
which  their  ambitions  make  inevitable.  Thus  we  have 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

drifted  on  until  all  the  contributions  of  western  civil- 
ization are  threatened  with  becoming  at  best  like  the 
contributions  which  aliens  draw  from  the  silent  pyra- 
mids, from  dead  poets  and  from  contemplating  the 
roofless  pillars  of  the  Parthenon.  By  a  casual  deduction 
from  an  "evolutionary  formula"  we  have  developed 
an  uncriticized  religious  faith  in  the  "type"  in  "man," 
which  has  fortified  much  irresponsible  prattle  about  the 
"sanity  of  the  people."  It  is  hardly  necessary  to  dwell 
on  the  fatalistic  implications  of  this  belief.  Professor 
William  Graham  Sumner's  Folkways  is  an  encyclo- 
pedic exposure  of  the  utter  groundlessness  of  all  our 
sentimentalism  about  the  wholesome  conservatism  of 
the  crowd;  it  shows  that  there  are  no  more  potent  in- 
struments for  the  slave-owner  and  the  demagogue  than 
mob-intuitions  or  mob-prejudices,  which  may  be  used 
not  only  against  another  mob,  but  against  the  very  mob 
which  possesses  them;  that  these  mob-prejudices  of  our 
most  sophisticated  twentieth  century  populations  have 
often  a  rigid  ancestry  extending  back  for  centuries  into 
savagery.  Let  criticism  awake  then  to  purify  our  re- 
ligion and  make  our  religion  truly  strong.  It  will 
be  our  privilege,  as  critics,  to  contemplate  the  most 
pessimistic  contingencies  ere  we  have  winnowed  our 
faiths  to  make  them  working-hypotheses. 

Let  us  glance  at  these  words,  for  example,  by  as 
thoughtful  a  biologist  and  psychologist  as  Mr.  Trotter: 

[46] 


CRITICISM - 

"We  see  man  today,  instead  of  the  frank  and  courageous  recog- 
nition of  his  status,  the  docile  attention  to  his  biological  history,  the 
determination  to  let  nothing  stand  in  the  way  of  the  security  and 
permanence  of  his  future,  which  alone  can  establish  the  safety  and 
happiness  of  the  race,  substituting  blind  confidence  in  his  destiny,  un- 
clouded faith  in  the  essentially  respectful  attitude  of  the  universe 
towards  his  moral  code,  and  a  belief  no  less  firm  that  his  traditions 
and  laws  and  institutions  necessarily  contain  permanent  qualities  of 
reality.  Living  as  he  does  in  a  world  where  outside  his  race  no 
allowances  are  made  for  infirmity,  and  where  figments,  however 
beautiful,  never  become  facts,  it  needs  but  little  imagination  to  see 
how  great  are  the  probabilities  that  after  all  man  will  prove  but  one 
more  of  Nature's  failures,  ignominiously  to  be  swept  from  her  work- 
table  to  make  way  for  another  venture  of  her  tireless  curiosity  and 
patience." 

Thus  speaks  our  doubting  Thomas,  criticism.  Crit- 
icism is  apparently  an  almost  ineradicable  stage  in 
our  mental  processes.  But  it  can  be  slurred  over.  For 
it  is  logic.  And  logic  is  often  painful.  Criticism  is  the 
fiery  realization  of  new  relations  as  in  the  case  of  the 
Russian  revolution.  Criticism,  indeed,  burns  more 
brightly  in  young  Russia  today  than  in  any  other  terri- 
tory of  the  world.  It  is  Russian  criticism  which  prom- 
ises today  the  truest  advance  towards  democracy.  Even 
though  its  working-hypotheses,  through  stress  of  the 
awful  rottenness  left  by  czarism  and  the  consequent  im- 
portunate problems,  be  occasionally  too  hastily  formu- 
lated, even  though  these  hypotheses  be  rejected  by  more 
selfish  states,  they  cannot,  once  uttered  to  the  world,  be 

[47] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

readily  forgotten  by  humanity.  It  is  as  though  young 
Russia  had  listened  to  hopes  like  those  of  Bergson  and 
fears  like  those  of  Trotter,  and  having  purified  her 
hopes  by  the  criticism  that  goes  to  the  roots  of  every 
tradition,  found  her  religion  modified  but  still  strong. 
Every  individual,  even  the  "humblest,"  is  to  some 
degree  a  religious  visionary,  a  critic,  a  scientist  and  an 
artist.  Stevenson  puts  it  charmingly  and  soundly  as  far 
as  the  artist  part  of  all  of  us  is  concerned:  "It  is  said 
that  a  poet  died  young  in  the  breast  of  the  most  stolid. 
It  may  be  contended  rather  that  a  (somewhat  minor) 
bard  in  almost  every  case  survives,  and  is  the  spice  of 
life  to  his  possessor.  Justice  is  not  done  to  the  versa- 
tility and  the  unplumbed  childishness  of  man's  imagi- 
nation. His  life  from  without  may  seem  but  a  rude 
mound  of  mud:  there  will  be  some  golden  chamber  at 
the  heart  of  it,  in  which  he  dwells  delighted."  He  in 
whom  scientific  experimentation  is  most  resourceful, 
we  artificially  segregate  in  histories  which  celebrate 
Archimedes,  Galileo,  Newton,  Cuvier,  Faraday.  He 
whom  generous  and  joyous  impulses  rather  than  cau- 
tion seem  to  dominate,  and  who  brings  with  rare  elo- 
quence strong  faiths  and  deep  despair  to  his  fellow- 
men,  we  call  an  illustrious  poet,  a  painter,  an  architect, 
a  musician,  an  actor,  a  dancer,  a  religious  prophet.  The 
critic  or  philosopher  is  one  who  purifies  and  organizes 
data  for  use  by  formulating  an  hypothesis,  and  he  is 

[48] 


CRITICISM 

great  if  his  perspective  is  so  spacious  that  he  makes 
our  efforts  for  progress  more  reflective,  and,  therefore, 
as  certain  as  they  can  ever  hope  to  be  in  this  universe  or 
pluriverse  whose  ultimate  meanings  are  so  mysterious 
to  us. 

Among  the  early  Greek  thinkers,  and  even  among 
sages  as  late  as  the  Renaissance,  men  took  all  knowledge 
for  their  province  because  the  data  of  knowledge  were 
not  so  numerous  that  this  seemed  absurd.  Then  came 
the  division  of  intellectual  labor.  Specialism,  emerg- 
ing in  minds  even  as  comprehensive  as  Descartes,  be- 
came intensified  in  the  eighteenth  century  and  even 
more  intensified  in  the  nineteenth.  Out  of  this  neces- 
sity has  grown  an  unnecessary  and  unsound  habit  of 
classifying  branches  of  learning  as  if  they  were  uncon- 
nected or  very  loosely  connected  on  all  sides.  To  be 
sure  none  of  us  can  return  to  the  all-embracing  re- 
flective habits  of  an  Aristotle  or  a  Bacon.  But  we  ought 
to  talk  less  about  subjects  as  if  they  had  an  independent 
existence.  We  ought  to  recognize  these  branches  of 
learning  as  stages  of  thought  ever  receding,  ever  re- 
curring with  varying  degrees  of  intensity  and  breadth. 
Sciences  are,  in  fact,  forming  new  intimacies  with  each 
other.  Note,  for  example,  the  young  alliance  called 
bio-chemistry  and  note  "animal  behavior."  Among 
latter-day  philosophers  the  growing  enthusiasm  for  a 
generic  study  of  value  is  making  for  larger  continuity. 

[49] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

In  philosophy  also  the  various  kinds  of  new  realists 
and  pragmatists  have  succeeded  in  reviving  what  Pro- 
fessor R.  W.  Sellars  calls  a  more  "frank  interaction" 
between  philosophy  and  science  after  a  "temporary 
estrangement  which  lasted  the  greater  part  of  the 
nineteenth  century."  Finally,  philosophy  is  more  alert 
in  what  Professor  Sellars  emphasizes  as  one  of  its  func- 
tions: "the  discovery  and  fostering  of  new  special 
sciences,"  which  separate  off  after  they  "have  secured 
a  healthy  growth"  without  wholly  forfeiting  the  philos- 
opher's interest.  There  is  a  wonderful  world-wide 
stirring  towards  a  new  orientation  and  unification  of 
the  "social  sciences,"  which,  with  the  help  of  the  more 
empirical  and  flexible  labor-movement,  excel  all  other 
currents  in  bringing  synthesis  back  to  its  proper  rela- 
tions with  analysis.  When  we  talk,  then,  about  re- 
ligion>  philosophy,  science  and  art  we  must  think  of 
them,  not  as  separate  areas,  but  as  states  of  mind  which 
we  all  share  in  differing  proportions  and  which  we  may 
expect  a  rapidly  growing  number  of  people  to  share 
more  richly,  with  more  versatility  and  with  better  and 
better  balance. 

And  so  we  must  pass  from  a  consideration  of  the 
religious  presupposition  of  proletarianism  to  its  critical 
implications.  As  we  saw  danger  in  uncriticized  re- 
ligion, let  us  beware  of  making  criticism  in  turn  all  im- 
portant. This  seems  to  have  been  Hegel's  tendency. 


CRITICISM 

And  we  must  beware  of  still  another  excess :  to  Auguste 
Comte  neither  the  religious  nor  the  critical,  but  the 
scientific,  was,  unfortunately,  supreme.  In  the  world's 
dawn,  men,  he  thought,  were  religious.  Then,  with 
widening  enlightenment,  they  turned  their  warmly 
colored  myths  into  the  cool,  clear  crystals  of  concepts. 
They  saw  no  more  the  breasts  of  the  nymph  in  the 
brake.  Pan  was  dead.  The  gradual  curves  of  the  sea- 
foam  no  longer  suggested  a  cradle  for  the  exquisite 
limbs  of  Aphrodite.  Men  argued  with  spare,  sinewy 
dialect  about  the  meaning  of  naturalness,  goodness, 
love,  truth,  virtue.  This  was  the  age  of  philosophy. 
Then  came  the  age  which  fully  emancipated  us, 
thought  Comte,  the  positive  age,  the  post-critical  age, 
the  development  of  science,  crown  of  human  achieve- 
ment. Comte  was  quite  right  in  his  ordering:  religion, 
philosophy  (criticism),  science.  But  he  was  wrong  in 
his  supposition  that  man's  perfected  thought  rested  in 
scientific  investigation.  Indeed,  he  lived  a  contradic- 
tion. For  did  not  he  himself  pass  on  again  from  his 
scientific  vigils  to  religious  enthusiasm?  He  devised 
what  he  called  the  religion  of  humanity  and  was  fain 
to  trick  it  out  with  a  pompous  array  of  priests  and 
rituals.  Comte's  cycle,  in  short,  was  one  which  the 
race  passes  through  not  once,  but  again  and  again  in  a 
lifetime,  in  a  year,  in  an  hour  sometimes,  sometimes  in 
the  utterance  of  a  single  sentence.  Comte's  account  was 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

not  a  history  of  dead  epochs,  it  was  really  a  sketch  of 
the  living  psychological  and  logical  processes  of  human 
beings  past  and  present:  religion,  criticism,  science,  art, 
religion,  criticism,  science,  art,  and  so  on,  no  one  factor 
supreme  except  for  a  time. 

Not  science  (made  a  fetich  by  Comte),  not  criticism 
(imperialized  by  Hegel),  not  art  or  religion — no  one 
of  these  is  supreme  in  any  permanent  way.  But  at  a 
given  moment,  in  a  certain  age,  or  for  a  certain  in- 
dividual luxuriating  in  a  definite  or  indefinite  experi- 
ence, coping  with  a  specific  dilemma,  exultant  with 
hope  or  sick  with  fear,  any  one  of  these  stages  will  be 
momentarily  supreme.  These  stages  whirl  round  and 
round,  higher  and  higher  (if  our  organisms  grow) 
lower  and  lower  (if  our  organisms  decay)  like  a  flam- 
ing spiral;  religion,  criticism,  science,  art,  religion, 
criticism,  science,  art  in  perpetual  mobility.  Is  it  not 
clear  that  men  are  great  by  virtue  of  passing  frequently 
through  all  these  stages,  experiencing  genuine  "con- 
versions" when  any  one  of  the  transitions  is  particularly 
dramatic  and  rich  with  emotional  tone,  circling  higher 
and  higher,  as  long  as  their  lives  are  great,  with  a  bal- 
ance of  all  stages  ever  firmer,  a  harmony  ever  richer? 
Darwin  came  to  prefer  the  reading  of  cheap  novels  to 
the  plays  of  Shakespeare,  a  fact  over  which  many  self- 
styled  "humanists"  have  done  much  pharisaical,  too 
audible  sighing.  But  will  these  "humanists"  really 


CRITICISM 

venture  to  deny  a  majestic  poetic  vision  to  one  who, 
from  a  sea-voyage,  from  the  reading  of  Malthus  and 
Lyell,  and  from  the  observation  of  a  few  domesticated 
animals  could  see  the  tremendous  continuities  and 
metamorphoses  of  natural  selection?  Shakespeare 
seems  at  times  to  be  uncritical,  a  moral  indifferentist, 
and  at  times  he  certainly  is.  But  who  will  deny  a  vast 
synoptic  power  to  the  singer  whose  amazing  tolerance 
fills  The  Tempest,  an  ethical  understanding  far  more 
in  accord  with  the  modern  sciences  than  are  the  hysteri- 
cal angers  of  professional  moralists? 

We  may  see,  from  all  this  what  a  fata  Morgana  is 
that  old  wives'  fear  and  pride  that  insists  on  an  abso- 
lute antithesis  between  criticism  and  creation,  how 
servile  is  the  half-truth  that  criticism  is  at  two  removes 
from  life.  And  now  let  us  return  to  our  two  companion 
questions:  What  is  criticism?  and  what  is  proletarian 
criticism? 

Criticism  we  may  define  as  that  stage  in  the  cycle  of 
thinking  and  acting  which  provides  a  rational  hypo- 
thesis for  progress  by  the  purification  and  organization 
of  data  for  experimental  use.  It  is  equally  futile  to 
imply  with  Matthew  Arnold  that  criticism,  though  in- 
dispensable, is  not  creation;  or  with  Oscar  Wilde  to 
vaunt  critcism  as  "more  creative  than  creation."  The 
word  creation  is  a  perilous  word,  because  it  is  impossi- 
ble to  find  anything  in  any  sense  alive  which  is  not  in 

[S3] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

some  fundamental  sense  creative.  Similarly,  as  some 
propagandists  have  discovered  to  their  cost,  it  is  quite 
impossible  to  find  a  single  being  who  is  not  in  some 
sense  a  parasite.  It  is  probable  that  this  futile  attempt 
to  sharpen  an  antithesis  between  "criticism"  and  "crea- 
tion" and  then  to  dub  "criticism"  parasitical  or  "de- 
structive" has  had  a  wider  vogue  among  English-speak- 
ing peoples  because  of  the  absurdly  narrow  meaning 
attached  to  the  word  "criticism"  in  the  England  of  the 
eighteenth  century,  and  perhaps  because  of  the  pro- 
verbial Anglo-Saxon  scorn  of  "ideas"  as  opposed  to 
"facts."  On  the  other  hand,  even  the  French  do  not 
seem  to  have  secured  a  much  greater  terminological 
precision  (for  all  their  unquestionable  supremacy  in 
most  of  the  kinds  of  criticism)  by  using  "critique"  for 
the  literary  work  of  a  Lemaitre  or  a  Brunetiere,  "crit- 
icisme"  for  the  German  "kritik,"  that  is  for  the  epist- 
emological  analysis  of  a  Kant  or  a  Renouvier. 

If  the  English  usage  is  too  narrowly  confined  to 
opinions  about  matters  of  art  or  fault-finding,  the 
French  choice  of  two  words  implies  a  purely  fictitious 
chasm  between  evaluations  of  art,  and  siftings  of 
scientific  data,  and  meditations  on  the  problem  of 
knowledge.  There  is  much  in  common  underlying 
Kant's  explorations  of  the  pure  and  practical  reason, 
the  organization  of  Gottingen  seminars  to  winnow 
the  data  for  humanistic  sciences,  Poincare's  inquiry 

[54] 


CRITICISM 

into  the  meaning  of  "energy"  in  a  physical  science, 
Anatole  France's  account  of  the  adventures  of  his  soul 
among  literary  masterpieces,  and  the  gossip  of  painters 
in  a  studio  about  their  technique. 

We  may  draw  distinctions  to  much  more  purpose  if 
we  describe  the  critical  or  philosophical  stage  of 
thought  by  contrasting  it  with  sentimentalism  on  the 
one  side  and  cynicism  on  the  other.  Suppose  we  learn 
that  religious  impulses  arise  through  fear  of  evil  in- 
fluences and  presume  with  Herbert  Spencer  that  man 
first  thought  of  personal  immortality  when  in  a  trivial 
moment  he  caught  a  furtive  reflection  of  his  hairy 
visage  in  a  woodland  stream;  suppose  we  recognize  that 
families  were  first  welded  by  sexual  appetites;  suppose 
we  recall  that  the  systematic  labor  by  which  the  prison- 
ers of  the  Goths  turned  aside  the  course  of  the  river 
to  sink  into  its  bed  the  gorgeous  tomb  of  Alaric  was 
slave-labor  consummated  by  the  massacre  of  the  ex- 
hausted slaves;  that  the  toil  which  upreared  the  enor- 
mous stones  of  the  Pyramids  was  slave-toil  that  must 
have  cost  thousands  of  lives  in  the  dawn  of  history. 
Suppose  we  admit  that  labor-unions  and  the  rapid 
growth  of  modern  capitalism  were  alike  made  possible 
largely  by  the  almost  fortuitous  control  of  steam.  The 
cynic,  when  he  contemplates  these  "causal"  chains, 
smiles  at  the  sordid  and  capricious  origins  of  all  that 
man  holds  sacred.  The  cynic  is  one  who  is  palsied  by 

ess] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

criticism  and  stiffened  by  the  fallacy  that  in  the  origin 
of  a  process  all  that  follows  is  contained  implicit,  that 
there  is  nothing  new  under  the  sun.  The  cynic  is  not 
quite  as  dangerous  as  he  is  often  thought  to  be,  though 
he  is  an  almost  useless  member  of  society.  But  the 
shallow  optimist  or  sentimentalist  is  very  dangerous. 
His  faith  is  so  fragile  that  when  he  is  confronted  with 
squalid  or  humble  origins  he  covers  his  face  with  his 
hands  and  strives  to  preserve  together  his  sensibilities 
and  his  ignorance.  He  tries  to  crush  the  first  whisper- 
ings of  criticism  within  him.  If  a  friend  urges  these 
criticisms  upon  him  he  grows  angry.  Thus  hugging  his 
"phantasies,"  shunning  "reality,"  he  tends  towards  de- 
mentia praecox  or  towards  paranoia.  For,  as  psycho- 
analysis has  demonstrated,  the  difference  between  the 
sane  and  the  insane  is  one  of  degree,  not  of  kind.  He 
upbraids  his  friend  with  disloyalty,  with  treason.  In 
a  brilliant  essay  Mr.  Owen  Wister  has  shown  how  in- 
jurious and  pervasive  this  "optimistic  squint"  has  been 
in  American  life,  how  it  refuses  with  obstinate  frivolity 
to  solve  with  a  little  troublesome  foresight  and  willing 
sacrifice  the  dread  perplexities  that  intrude  today. 
When  the  sentimentalists  are  too  persistently  admon- 
ished to  open  their  eyes  beyond  an  optimistic  squint, 
they  have  been  known  to  gather  in  mobs  to  crucify, 
stone,  tar  and  feather,  or  lynch  the  prophets.  But  the 
critic  is  one  who  knows  that  "everything  ideal  has  a 

[56] 


CRITICISM 

natural  basis  and  everything  natural  an  ideal  develop- 
ment," who,  as  Professor  F.  J.  Woodbrige  likes  to  say, 
"looks  at  a  swamp  and  sees  there  a  metropolis"  like 
Petrograd,  which  he  will  some  day  rear  because  as 
critic  he  knows  that  he  must  see  the  industrial  slavery 
in  all  its  ugliness  in  order  to  lead  men  towards  democ- 
racy, in  order  to  unseal  the  eyes  of  men  for  some  vision 
of  a  "Beloved  Community."  The  critic,  then,  must 
recognize  that- at  least  one  of  the  chief  origins  of  re- 
ligion was  and  is  brute  fear,  and  he  will  only  marvel 
all  the  more  at  its  ideal  fulfillment  in  a  cathedral.  It 
is  not  necessary  and  it  is  certainly  not  wise  for  him 
to  suppose  his  metropolis  or  his  "Beloved  Community" 
to  be  already  existent,  even  in  some  etherealized  meta- 
physical sense  of  the  word  "existent"  A  sound  critic 
will  be,  as  William  James  observed,  neither  pessimist 
nor  optimist;  he  will  be  a  meliorist. 

And  now  we  are  ready  to  examine  the  particular 
criticism  or  philosophy  called  proletarian,  which  must 
purify  that  religious  elan  which  syndicalism  expresses 
with  the  rapturous  cry  of  "solidarity,"  which  the  Rus- 
sian workers  have  expressed  with  a  renewal  of  the  old 
Marxian  slogan,  "working  men  of  all  countries  unite!" 
which  was  put  up  after  the  Revolution  on  the  facade  of 
the  imperial  palace  in  Petrograd.  Proletarian  crit- 
icism or  philosophy  has  culminated  in  the  famous,  but 
widely  misinterpreted,  principle  or  working-hypothesis 

[57] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

of  "direct  action"  with  its  corollary,  "the  abolition  of 
the  wage-system."  To  consider  that  "direct  action"  is 
to  be  accounted  for  historically  by  describing  it  as  the 
mere  survival  or  recrudescence  of  the  old-fashioned 
anarchistic  "propaganda  of  the  deed,"  is  an  absurdity 
possible  only  to  those  who  have  made  no  attempt  to 
study  the  extraordinarily  complicated  and  rich  achieve- 
ment of  federalistic  labor  organizations  in  twentieth 
century  France,  the  milieu  in  England  which  Tom 
Mann  found  ready  after  his  experiences  in  Australia, 
the  peasants  of  South  Italy  awakening  in  the  Great 
War,  the  peculiar  sufferings  of  the  migratory  laborers 
in  the  Pacific  and  southwest  regions  of  the  United 
States,  the  enormous  experiments  of  the  Soviets  of 
revolutionary  Russia. 

As  a  matter  of  fact  the  most  impressive  intellectual 
ancestor  of  "direct  action"  is  the  "categorical  impera- 
tive" underlying  the  ethics  of  Kant,  with  its  presup- 
position of  the  moral  autonomy  of  the  individual,  and 
his  sacred  right  and  responsibility  to  so  act  that  he 
could  will  the  maxim  of  his  conduct  to  be  a  universal 
law,  in  so  far  as  he  can,  after  earnest  and  implacable 
reasoning,  see  the  truth.  Some  will  remind  us  of  the 
unbridled  emotionalism  of  these  masses  and  of  the 
"anti-intellectualistic"  attempt  of  M.  Georges  Sorel  to 
associate  it  with  Bergsonism.  But,  as  Mr.  Walling 
has  shown  at  some  length  in  The  Larger  Aspects  of 

[58] 


CRITICISM 

Socialism,  the  autonomous  action  of  radical  laborers 
is  experimental  or  pragmatic  rather  than  anti-intel- 
lectualistic.  As  the  distinguished  English  scholar, 
Mr.  G.  D.  H.  Cole,  sums  it  up  in  a  pregnant  sentence: 
"The  development  by  the  working-class  of  institutions 
of  its  own,  what  M.  Lagardelle  calls  'Socialism  of  In- 
stitutions,' is  far  more  really  the  central  point  of  its 
philosophy  than  Bergsonian  elan  vital."  We  have 
tried  to  devote  all  due  emphasis  to  what  we  have  called 
the  religious  aspect  of  proletarianism  and  to  show  that 
it  is  the  most  vital  religion  in  the  world.  Too  often 
proletarians  themselves  try  to  explain  it  away  in  vain 
and  fail  thus  to  claim  what  would  be  of  tactical  advan- 
tage. But  we  must  be  careful  now  not  to  fall  in  with 
the  new  sentimental  school  that  would  describe  prole- 
tarianism as  all  religion  and  all  intuition,  as  a  reaction 
against  the  cynical  school  which  for  nearly  two  gen- 
erations has  described  it  as  utterly  devoid  of  religion. 
As  for  syndicalism  specifically,  it  is  the  most  critical 
proletarianism  and,  indeed,  the  most  critical  humanism 
of  any  kind  that  has  yet  appeared  and  it  is,  therefore, 
pre-eminently  rational.  It  is  radical  in  the  real  sense: 
it  goes  to  the  roots  of  things.  As  Sombart  saw:  "They 
(the  syndicalists  )have  seen  more  deeply  than  any  other 
socialist  thinkers  into  the  evils  of  our  modern  civiliza- 
tion." Proletarians  are  more  pragmatic  than  Kantian 
in  so  far  as  they  place  more  ethical  emphasis  on  the  con- 

[59] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 


sequences  than  on  the  motives  of  a  deed.  But,  like  the 
sterner  Pragmatists,  they  do  not  find  it  necessary  to 
sacrifice  any  of  the  principle  of  rational  individual 
autonomy,  which  they  interpret  and  apply  with  great 
richness. 

Twentieth  century  "direct  action"  implies  no  mysti- 
cal faith  in  any  "natural  law"  which  might,  according 
to  eighteenth  century  physiocrats,  act  through  benev- 
olent landlords  or  which  might,  according  to  nineteenth 
century  Spencerianism,  act  through  that  bourgeois 
competition  miscalled  individualism.  Syndicalism  is 
as  suspicious  of  "natural  law"  as  it  is  of  the  present 
State.  Nor  does  it  have  any  pseudo-Darwinian  faith  in 
a  beneficent  struggle  ending  inevitably  in  the  "survival 
of  the  fittest,"  for  it  thinks  that  the  qualities  of  the  socio- 
logically fittest  may  be  determined  only  by  careful  and 
elaborate  investigation  and  by  criticism,  not  by  trusting 
blindly  to  "nature"  or  "chance"  or  "politics."  Finally 
syndicalism  is  in  the  forefront  of  investigation  with  all 
critical  scientists  in  its  repudiation  of  the  deduction  of 
a  "natural  law"  of  "gradual  change,"  which  Darwin  ac- 
cepted too  hastily  from  his  own  observations  too  strong- 
ly colored  by  Lyell's  geological  generalizations,  which 
Victorian  sentimentalists  turned  into  a  comfortable 
doctrine  of  evolutionary  fatalism,  a  force  by  virtue  of 
which  we  were  to  toboggan  gently,  willy  nilly,  into 
Utopia.  Syndicalism  has  seen  that  even  Socialists  have 

[60] 


become  uncritical  gradualists  because  of  certain  spe- 
cious dialetical  turns  developed  from  Haeckel's  so- 
called  Biogenetic  Law  and  from  Morgan's  unilinear 
idea  of  human  evolution.  But  the  social  hypotheses  of 
syndicalism  are  perfectly  congruous  with  the  biology  of 
De  Vries  and  Bateson  (their  allowance  for  some  "mu- 
tations," "releases,"  sudden  changes)  as  opposed  to  a 
snail-like  "recapitulation."  And  the  hypotheses  of 
syndicalism  may  be  correlated  with  the  findings  of 
modern  ethnologists  that  human  societies  do  not  each 
one  necessarily  pass  through  the  same  stages  of  evolu- 
tion. England  may  skip  much  of  New  Zealand's  State 
Socialism.  Russia  may  skip  most  of  England's  nine- 
teenth century  capitalism.  The  American  Federation 
of  Labor  may  work  out  its  own  healthy  federalism 
and  larger  fighting-units,  without  inevitably  passing 
through  all  the  experiences  of  the  Confederation  Gen- 
erale  du  Travail.  But  speculations  of  this  sort  must 
await  our  examination  into  the  nature  of  history. 


[61] 


V 
HISTORY  AND  FREEDOM 

MOST  so-called  history  today,  whether  proletarian  or 
bourgeois,  implies  some  naive  form  of  causal  determin- 
ism.   A  soap-boxer  finds  the  phrase,  "the  materialistic 
conception  of  history,"  just  as  ecstatically  mouth-filling 
as  does  a  lover  the  Shakespearean  harmonies 
"Let  me  not  to  the  marriage  of  true  minds 
Admit  impediment." 

An  academician  finds  a  more  decorous  auto-intoxica- 
tion in  a  more  equivocal  curiosity  over  "the  economic 
interpretation  of  history." 

Once  upon  a  time  Descartes,  who  did  so  much  to  set 
us  all  agonizing  over  epistemology,  divided  the  uni- 
verse into  two  parts:  that  which  is  mechanical,  e.  g., 
the  stars,  dirt,  animals,  our  bodies,  in  short  most  of  the 
things  which  he  was  eager  to  find  out  something  about; 
and  that  which  is  spiritual  like  the  soul  which  he  stuffed 
away  in  our  pineal  glands,  the  will  which  he  used  when 
he  was  argumentatively  in  a  tight  place,  and  God  whose 
existence  he  proved  with  his  particular  version  of  an 
immortal  quibble  called  "the  entological  argument," 
which  has  dazzled  student-lamp-dimmed  eyes  from 

[62] 


HISTORY  AND  FREEDOM 


Augustine  to  Anselm,  to  Descartes,  to  Spinoza,  to 
Hegel,  to  Royce. 

But  like  Descartes  most  of  the  scientists  of  the  seven- 
teenth, eighteenth,  and  nineteenth  centuries  were  eager 
to  explore  matters  mechanical,  and  rather  inclined  to 
leave  spiritual  considerations  to  priests,  poets,  lovers 
and  elderly  ladies.  As  long  as  scientists  studied  "na- 
ture" more  passionately  than  "human  nature,"  Car- 
tesian mechanism  or  some  variation  of  it  worked  very 
well.  But  when  they  tried  exultantly  to  apply  to  the 
study  of  elusive  man  the  same  methods  which  cast  il- 
lumination on  the  infinitely  slow  movements  of  stars, 
the  silent  development  of  crystals,  the  cut  and  dried 
volatility  of  acids  and  gases,  our  scientists  made  griev- 
ous blunders,  premature  plunges  which  have  bank- 
rupted bourgeois  economics,  fossilized  much  experi- 
mental psychology,  and  forbidden  history  to  become  a 
science  in  anything  but  name. 

From  Descartes'  dualism  and  from  many  far  less  in- 
spiring sources,  but  most  of  all  from  that  inner  conflict 
between  primal  and  rebellious  desires  and  the  censor 
wish  which  Freud  describes,  all  "respectable"  people 
have  developed  the  vicious  habit  of  rending  sciences 
apart  into  the  "descriptive"  and  the  "normative,"  and 
making  social  chasms  between  the  "menial"  worker  and 
the  man  of  "leisure"  whose  befuddled  mind  Mr.  Thor- 
stein  Veblen  has  laid  bare  in  a  unique  satire.  If  think- 

[63] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

ers  had  dared  to  follow  the  truly  "world  destroying 
thought"  of  David  Hume,  when  he  exhorted  mankind 
to  extend  the  scientific  study  of  "nature"  to  "human  na- 
ture,' the  evil  ways  into  which  psychologists,  econom- 
ists, and  historians  fell  might  have  been  avoided.  The 
attack  of  the  British  empiricists  on  the  Cartesian  doc- 
trine of  innate  ideas  (most  of  which  were  to  Descartes 
like  the  axioms  of  geometry)  had  halted  the  continen- 
tal hope  of  exploring  the  universe  in  a  rigid  mathemati- 
cal way.  Hume  carried  empirical  doctrines  to  fine  un- 
compromising conclusions  including  his  merciless  ex- 
posure of  the  difficulties  of  the  whole  concept  of 
"cause."  But  Kant,  although  he  certainly  was  "awak- 
ened from  his  dogmatic  slumber"  by  the  reading  of 
Hume,  restated  the  work  of  the  emancipating  English 
philosopher  with  such  a  vast  surplusage  of  pedantry 
and  of  reactionary  vestiges  (along  with  some  spacious 
discoveries),  that  he  allowed  himself  and  his  followers 
to  sink  back  into  the  old  dualism,  somewhat  rarified, 
but  still  vicious.  In  other  words,  Kant  gave  up  trying 
to  fence  off  the  universe  which  we  contemplate  into  two 
parts,  the  mechanical  and  the  spiritual;  but  he  tried  to 
split  our  stream  of  thinking  into  two  parts:  a  restricted 
method  of  "pure  reason"  and  a  broader,  vaguer  method 
of  "practical  reason."  To  later  minds  it  appeared  that 
economics  and  history  might  use  the  "pure  reason"  with 
a  basis  in  the  "category  of  causality,"  while  ethics 

[64] 


HISTORY  AND  FREEDOM 


might  remain  divorced  stumbling  blindly  to  find  its 
way  by  means  of  the  "practical  reason." 

Orthodox  economists  and  historians  and  psycholo- 
gists still  strive  to  fence  off  all  their  material  in  the  me- 
chanical area  of  Descartes'  unreal  bipartite  universe,  or 
to  limit  their  way  of  thinking  to  Kant's  "pure  reason." 
In  the  eighteenth  century  Adam  Smith  made  a  fine  ef- 
fort to  take  a  more  synthetic  view  of  economic  "facts" 
and  moral  "ideals."  But  later  economists  and  histo- 
rians yielded  more  and  more  to  a  temptation  towards  a 
very  artificial  abstraction  of  material  and  a  restriction 
of  method.  They  saw  that  the  mechanistic  philosophy 
of  French  scientists  (a  naive  version  of  one  part  of 
Descartes'  rationalism)  had  made  great  progress  with 
physics,  chemistry,  mineralogy,  anatomy,  statistics.  So 
economists  and  historians  hustled  their  apportioned 
phenomena  into  the  bondage  of  a  most  fantastic  causal 
chain.  The  more  heterodox  members  of  the  post-Kan- 
tian school  of  philosophy  produced  an  heterodox  eco- 
nomics and  history.  Where  Hegel  had  described  the 
supreme  reality  in  the  universe  as  being  the  rational, 
ever-changing  "World  Spirit,"  Marx  confined  him- 
self to  "mother-earth,"  and  found  the  greatest  reality 
for  man  to  be  the  influence  of  the  materialistic  ever- 
changing  tool  of  production.  Certainly  there  is  much 
truth  in  what  has  been  loosely  referred  to  as  his  "eco- 
nomic determinism."  Man  in  his  daring  explorations 

[65] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

of  "natural"  phenomena  had  discovered  and  unleashed 
forces  which,  in  the  guise  of  machinery,  threatened  and 
still  threaten  to  make  him  and  his  social  organization 
their  slaves.  The  materialistic  necessitarianism  of 
Marx  had  also  a  great  practical  influence  when  we  re- 
member that  it  was  prepared  mainly  for  workers  who 
had  visions  as  restricted  and  desperate  as  those  of  the 
machine-destroying  Luddites  of  England  and  the  weav- 
ers of  Germany.  As  Bertrand  Russell  puts  it:  "There 
is  an  almost  oriental  tinge  in  the  belief,  shared  by  all 
orthodox  Marxians,  that  capitalistic  society  is  doomed, 
and  the  advent  of  the  communist  state  a  preordained 
necessity.  As  a  fighting  force,  as  an  appeal  to  man's 
whole  emotional  force,  Social  Democracy  gains  inesti- 
mable strength  from  this  belief,  which  keeps  it  sober 
and  wise  through  all  difficulties,  and  inspires  its  work- 
ers with  unshakable  confidence  in  the  ultimate  victory 
of  their  cause."  Russell  considers  that  The  Communist 
Manifesto,  so  easily  accessible  to  all  laborers,  is  "for 
terse  eloquence,  for  biting  wit  and  for  historical  insight 
.  .  .  one  of  the  finest  pieces  of  political  literature  ever 
produced."  It  has,  he  continues,  "all  the  epic  force  of 
the  materialistic  theory  of  history:  its  cruel  unsenti- 
mental fatality,  its  disdain  of  morals  and  religion,  its 
reduction  of  all  social  relations  to  the  blind  action  of 
impersonal  productive  forces  .  .  .  [Marx]  rests  his 
doctrine,  not  on  the  'justice'  preached  by  Utopia-mon- 

[66] 


HISTORY  AND  FREEDOM 


gers  (as  he  calls  his  socialist  predecessors),  not  on  sen- 
timental love  of  man,  which  he  never  mentions  with- 
out immeasurable  scorn,  but  on  historical  necessity 
alone,  on  the  blind  growth  of  productive  forces,  which 
must  in  the  end  swallow  up  the  capitalist  who  has  been 
compelled  to  produce  them."  The  Marx-inspired 
worker  could  flout  despair  in  days  when  despair  seemed 
irresistible,  and  adjure  his  fellows  not  to  destroy  ma- 
chinery but  to  plan  to  perfect  it  and  assume  control  over 
it  in  accordance  with  unalterable  law.  "Economic  de- 
terminism" could  replace  the  Lord  of  Hosts.  Little 
wonder  that  the  class-conscious  proletarians  were  in- 
clined at  first  to  cling  as  yearningly  to  their  atheism 
as  Hebrews  and  Puritans  cling  to  their  warrior 
deity.  Since  the  middle  of  the  nineteenth  century,  how- 
ever, militant  workers  have  been  coming  more  and 
more  to  feel  the  force  of  sentiments  similar  to  those 
which  Dostoievsky  puts  into  the  mouth  of  a  bank  offi- 
cial who  was  "a  sort  of  superintendent  of  a  whole  regi- 
ment of  political  detectives :" 

'  'We  are  not  particularly  afraid  of  all  these  socialists,  anarchists, 
infidels  and  revolutionists ;  we  keep  watch  on  them  and  know  all  their 
goings  on.  But  there  are  a  few  peculiar  men  among  them  who  believe 
in  God  and  are  Christians,  but  at  the  same  time  are  socialists.  Those 
are  the  people  we  are  most  afraid  of.  They  are  dreadful  people! 
The  socialist  who  is  a  Christian  is  more  to  be  dreaded  than  a  socialist 
who  is  an  atheist.'  " 

But  nobody  dreads  the  academic  historian  who  is  po- 

[67] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

lite  to  Christianity  and  who  has  diluted  Marxism  into 
an  economic  interpretation  of  history.  Marx  formu- 
lated with  his  "materialistic  conception  of  history"  at 
once  a  magnificent  gospel  for  proletarian  action  and  a 
great  hypothesis  which  has  been  as  helpful  in  all  brave, 
sound  organizing  of  the  sciences  of  human  nature,  as 
has  been  the  Darwinian  hypothesis  in  the  organization 
of  the  once  bickering  sciences  or  biology. 

But  we  must,  at  the  risk  of  appearing  for  the  time  far 
more  revisionist  Marxian  than  we  are,  confine  ourselves 
to  an  assault  on  that  naive  form  of  causal  determinism 
known  among  academicians  and  socialists  alike  as  "eco- 
nomic determinism."  It  is  a  blind  product  of  literary 
influences  like  the  dualisms  of  Descartes  and  Kant,  of 
social  influence  like  the  cleavage  between  the  status  of 
the  "menial"  worker  and  the  man  of  "leisure,"  of  a 
compromise  which  is  but  a  quack  cure  of  that  internal 
conflict  in  each  of  us  which  Freud  describes  as  the  con- 
flict between  the  primal  wishes  and  the  censor  or  repres- 
sive, conventionalizing  part  of  us. 

A  glance,  however,  at  the  present  fortunes  of  the 
"category  of  causality"  will  rid  us  of  this  bogy-dualism. 
The  very  simple  "causal  mechanism"  of  both  the  more 
naive  contemporary  Marxists,  and  the  orthodox  eco- 
nomists and  historians  is  doomed  as  far  as  the  scientific 
study  of  man  is  concerned.  First  the  new  emphasis  on 
the  study  of  the  generic  meaning  of  value  militates,  on 

[68] 


HISTORY  AND  FREEDOM 


the  whole,  against  a  mechanistic  view  of  social  phe- 
nomena. Then  again  students  of  the  more  methodo- 
logically advanced  sciences  of  man  (notably  psychology 
and  ethnology)  tend  to  abandon  the  confusing  word 
"cause"  altogether  and,  making  as  little  as  possible  of 
the  mere  postulate  of  the  "uniformity  of  nature,"  talk 
of  "correlating  x  and  so  and  so"  instead  of  saying  "so 
and  so  is  the  cause  of  x."  Others,  more  fearful  of  as- 
suming such  a  profound  scientific  humility,  yet  recog- 
nizing that  the  old  distinction  of  "final  cause"  and  "effi- 
cient cause"  gave  way  during  the  eighteenth  and  nine- 
teenth centuries  to  an  exclusive  devotion  to  "efficient 
causes,"  are  beginning  to  talk  about  different  "levels" 
of  "efficient  causality"  or  about  "differential  reactions" 
to  "stimuli."  All  these  tendencies  among  progressive 
intellectuals  in  their  re-orientation  of  the  sciences  of 
man,  are  strongly  paralleled  by  the  change  in  the  spirit 
of  the  labor  movement  from  grim  fatalism  and  its  ca- 
pricious opposite,  trial  and  error  desperation;  from 
Marxian  necessitarianism  and  its  capricious  opposite, 
"muddling  through,"  to  the  flexible  experimentalism  of 
the  syndicalists,  of  the  industrial  unionists,  of  the  guild 
socialists,  of  Nikolai  Lenin. 

While  it  would  be  very  rash  to  expect  much  from  the 
"vitalists"  in  biology  and  while  the  old  "indetermin- 
ism"  is  naught  but  a  disguised  fatalism,  it  would  be 
equally  rash  to  place  our  trust  with  the  "mechanists." 

r  £      i 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

Nobody  has  shown  more  clearly  than  Emile  Boutroux 
how,  as  we  overlook  our  mechanical,  physical,  chemi- 
cal, biological,  psychological,  and  sociological  "laws," 
as  we  pass  from  the  study  of  "natural"  phenomena  to 
the  observation  of  more  and  more  distinctively  "hu- 
man" affairs,  we  find  it  increasingly  difficult  to  subject 
our  material  to  any  inflexible  causal  category. 

"On  the  one  hand,  mathematics  is  necessary  only  with  reference  to 
postulates  whose  necessity  cannot  be  demonstrated,  and  so  is  only 
hypothetical  after  all.  On  the  other  hand,  the  application  of  mathe- 
matics to  reality  is  only  approximate,  and  seems  as  though  it  could 
be  nothing  else.  Under  these  conditions,  what  is  the  doctrine  of 
determinism?  It  is  a  generalization  and  a  passing  over  to  the  limit. 
Certain  concrete  sciences  approach  mathematical  rigidity;  the  infer- 
ence is  that  they  are  all  destined  to  attain  to  the  same  perfection.  The 
distance  that  separates  us  from  the  goal  may  be  increasingly  lessened ; 
the  inference  is  that  it  may  become  nil.  This  generalization,  how- 
ever, is  a  theoretical  view.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  distance  between 
mathematics  and  reality  is  not  on  the  point  of  being  abolished,  and 
if  it  is  lessening,  the  number  of  intermediaries  which  would  have  to 
be  intercalated  to  affect  the  junction  of  the  two  appears  more  and 
more  to  be  infinite.  Historically  the  idea  of  reducing  the  real  to  the 
mathematical  is  due  to  ignorance  of  the  incommensurability  of 
the  real  and  of  the  mathematical;  ignorance,  in  this  case,  has  had 
good  results,  for  less  eagerness  would  have  been  shown  in  making 
for  a  goal  known  to  be  inaccessible.  The  application  of  the  Cartesian 
idea  not  only  demonstrated  its  fertility,  it  also  transformed  into  a 
transcendent  ideal  what,  to  Descartes,  was  a  principle  and  a  starting- 
point. 

"But  if  we  compare  with  the  present  state  of  science  the  testimony 

[70] 


HISTORY  AND  FREEDOM 


of  consciousness  in  favour  of  freedom,  we  shall  find  this  testimony  far 
more  acceptable  now  than  it  was  in  Cartesian  dualism,  for  instance. 
When  things  were  reduced  to  matter  and  thought,  to  assume  man 
to  be  free  and  his  freedom  to  be  efficacious,  was  to  admit  that  spirit, 
as  substance,  moves  matter,  as  discrete  substance.     Now,  this  is  in- 
comprehensible, whether  we  assume  that  spirit  creates  motor  force 
or  admit  that  what  is  not  itself  motion  can  directly  determine  motion. 
Science,  however,  by  no  means  establishes  the  reality  of  this  dualism. 
It  rather  shows  us  a  hierarchy  of  sciences,  a  hierachy  of  laws,  which 
we  can  compare  with  one  another,  but  not  blend  into  a  single  science 
of  external  things  and  into  a  single  law.     It  shows  us,  besides,  along 
with  the   relative  heterogeneity  of  laws,   their  influence  upon   one 
another.    The  physical  laws  involve  living  beings,  and  the  biological 
laws  combine  their  action  with  that  of  the  physical  laws.    In  presence 
of  these  results,  we  are  led  to  inquire  whether  thought  and  motion, 
along  with  the  abyss  that  separates  them,  might  not  be  our  mode 
of  bringing  things  clearly  before  the  mind,  rather  than  their  real 
mode  of  being.    Motion,  per  se,  it  would  appear,  is  but  an  abstraction, 
as  also  is  thought,  per  se.     What  exists  are  beings  whose  nature  is 
intermediate  between  the  pure  idea  of  thought  and  of  motion.    These 
beings  form  a  hierarchy,  and  action  moves  amongst  them  from  above, 
downwards,  and  from  below,  upwards.     Spirit  moves  matter  neither 
immediately,  nor  even  mediately.    There  is  no  crude  matter,  however, 
and  what  constitutes  the  being  of  matter  is  in  communication  with 
what  constitutes  the  being  of  spirit.    That  which  we  call  the  laws  of 
nature  is  the  sum  total  of  the  methods  we  have  discovered  for  adapting 
things  to  the  mind  and  subjecting  them  to  be  moulded  by  the  will.    In 
the  beginning,  man  saw  nothing  but  caprice  and  arbitrariness  every- 
where.    Consequently,  the  freedom  which  he  attributes  unto  himself 
had  nothing  on  which  it  could  lay  hold.    Modern  science  showed  him 
physical  law  everywhere,  and  he  imagined  he  saw  his  freedom  being 
engulfed  in  universal  determinism.     A  correct  idea,  however,  of  the 

[71] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

natural  laws,  restores  him  to  true  self-possession,  and  at  the  same  time 
assures  him  that  his  freedom  may  be  efficacious  and  control  phenomena. 
Of  things  without  and  things  within,  the  latter  alone,  said  Epictetus, 
depend  on  ourselves,  and  he  was  right  at  the  time  he  spoke.  The 
mechanical  laws  of  nature,  revealed  by  modern  science,  form,  in 
reality,  the  chain  that  binds  the  without  to  the  within.  Instead  of 
being  a  necessity,  they  set  us  free;  they  enable  us  to  supplement,  by 
active  science,  that  state  of  contemplation  in  which  the  ancients  were 
plunged." 

Not  many  of  our  laborers  have  cultivated  any  in- 
somnia over  these  subtleties  about  the  history  of  science 
or  the  nature  of  history  or  the  present  status  of  the  deter- 
ministic-indeterministic  controversy.  Yet  more  of  them 
have  thought  about  it  than  most  "educated"  people  sup- 
pose. If  you  doubt  it  visit  the  "East  Side"  in  New  York 
City,  ask  library-attendants  there  what  the  inhabitants 
of  the  "Ghetto"  read  most  assiduously,  and  compare 
your  results  with  what  you  find  engaging  the  attention 
of  most  of  your  fellows  in  the  "upper  classes."  An  I. 
W.  W.  in  jail  at  Seattle  wrote  to  his  friend  and  mine, 
Professor  Carleton  Parker,  for  the  Critique  of  Pure 
Reason.  Nor  would  any  one  who  knew  this  man  as  well 
as  Professor  Parker  and  I  did  doubt  that  he  would  read 
the  book  and  read"  it  rigorously.  While  the  growing  mi- 
nority of  proletarian  critics  sharpen  their  wits  on  discus- 
sions more  or  less  like  those  with  which  we  have  just 
been  grappling,  the  rank  and  file  of  the  proletariat 
gropes  its  way  along  to  a  point  of  view  less  closely  rea- 

[72] 


HISTORY  AND  FREEDOM 


soned  but  substantially  the  same  in  its  conclusions  as  re- 
gards the  reality  of  freedom  for  them.  You  still  hear 
much  talk  in  little  socialist  "locals"  about  "economic 
determinism."  But  most  of  the  socialists  there  will  ex- 
plain to  you  that  Marx  was  not  an  "economic  determin- 
ist,"  and  will  quote  you  passages  from  Marx  and  Engels 
to  establish  for  them  a  more  complex  point  of  view. 
What  these  socialists  and,  along  with  them,  many  rank 
and  file  workmen  who  would  noisily  proclaim  them- 
selves anti-socialists  are  most  busy  demonstrating — and 
demonstrating  beyond  cavil — is  that  there  are  many 
capitalists  in  the  world  who  are  disproportionately  de- 
pendent on  the  work  of  others,  and  are  disproportion- 
ately rewarded  by  society,  that  enormous  waste  and  in- 
justice follows,  but  that  the  difficulty  is  to  be  solved  by 
experiments  in  the  greatest  laboratory  for  the  social  sci- 
ences in  existence,  the  changing  labor-unions,  which  are 
verifying  with  growing  autonomy  and  sense  of  control 
the  Marxian  hypothesis  that  "surplus  value"  must  be, 
in  the  words  of  the  British  Labor  Party,  "for  the  com- 
mon good."  The  most  enlightened  and  audacious  of 
these  proletarians  state  their  expectations  in  terms  of 
direct  action,  the  abolition  of  the  wage  system,  the  re- 
construction of  a  new  society,  "within  the  shell  of  the 
old,"  the  perfecting  of  a  neo-federalistic  State  which 
receives  rent  from  autonomous  national  guilds  or  indus- 
trial unions  wherein  the  workers  control  the  productive 

[73] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

processes  and  the  dignity  of  labor  is  restored  with  the 
joy  of  labor. 

Thoughtful  laborers,  then,  and  forward-looking  stu- 
dents of  the  sciences  of  man  are  rapidly  ridding  them- 
selves of  the  notion  that  human  history  is  to  be  re- 
counted in  terms  of  "economic"  or  any  other  "mechan- 
istic" "causal  determinism."  They  are  also  very  sure 
that  history  is  something  much  more  subtle  and  demo- 
cratic than  a  picturesque  account  of  the  doings  of  "he- 
roes." They  know  that  it  is  not  merely  a  faithful  nar- 
rative of  "facts,"  of  "incidents."  But  beyond  this  agree- 
ment as  to  what  history  is  not  or  is  only  in  part,  few 
men,  even  the  most  thoughtful,  are  clear.  Many  intel- 
lectually intrepid  men  agree  gropingly  and  implicitly 
on  certain  constructive  features.  If  you  read,  to  take 
a  few  distinguished  examples  almost  at  random,  va- 
rious utterances  by  Professor  W.  Warde  Fowler,  Pro- 
fessor John  L.  Myres,  Professor  Percy  Gardiner,  Pro- 
fessor James  H.  Breasted,  and  many  others,  you  would 
be  vaguely  but  strongly  impressed  with  a  sense  of  their 
fundamental  concord.  But  just  what  is  explicitly  this 
emerging  reconstructive  view  of  history?  It  has  re- 
mained for  Professor  Frederick  J.  Teggart  to  make  this 
articulate  for  us  in  two  recent  books  of  the  greatest  im- 
port, volumes  around  which  students  of  the  sciences  of 
man  and  practical  labor-unionists  could  rally  to  take 
many  a  large  survey  of  the  great  processes  which  have 

[74] 


HISTORY  AND  FREEDOM 


made  man  what  he  is,  to  plan  outlines  for  the  present 
and  future  conduct  of  man.  We  have  said  that  Marx 
did  more  than  any  one  else  to  energize  sustained  efforts 
towards  the  organization  of  the  sciences  of  man.  It  has 
remained  for  Professor  Teggart  to  broaden  the  base 
and  to  make  this  organization  more  coherent.  Read- 
ers of  Professor  Teggart  will  observe  that  he  does  not 
utterly  reject,  but  rather  purifies  and  reconciles  in  a 
larger  whole  the  most  fruitful  of  the  older  theories 
touching  the  nature  of  history,  the  Marxist,  for  instance, 
and  the  views  of  Buckle.  It  ought,  moreover,  to  be  per- 
fectly clear  that  while  Professor  Teggart's  phraseology 
is  through  and  through  "deterministic,"  his  brand  of 
"determinism"  presents  no  incompatibility  with  that 
"feeling  of  freedom"  or  that  "presupposition  of  free- 
dom" which  we  shall  find  in  a  later  essay  playing  a  very 
fundamental  part  in  a  rapidly  spreading  critical  atti- 
tude. Nor  does  Mr.  Teggart's  "deterministic"  view  of 
the  sciences  of  man  collide  in  any  way  with  M.  Bou- 
troux's  account  of  the  complexity  of  sociological  cate- 
gories as  contrasted  with  those  of  physics.  Mr.  Teg- 
gart does  not  repudiate  M.  Boutroux's  theory  of  a  "hier- 
archy of  beings."  As  we  turn  from  that  stage  in  our 
thought  which  leads  to  the  formulation  of  a  hypothesis, 
and  in  which  we  fairly  tingle  with  a  sense,  a  promise  of 
freedom,  towards  that  stage  in  which  we  try,  as  Dewey 
describes,  to  verify  our  hypotheses  and  to  control  our 

[75] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

data  or,  in  the  other  words  of  McDougall,  towards 
that  "fourth  level  of  conduct"  in  which  we  act  on  prin- 
ciple, we  naturally  look  upon  data  external  to  us  (data 
which  we  may  control)  in  a  "deterministic"  way,  or 
better,  in  a  way  which  implies  that  our  data  is  deter- 
minable,  that  our  knowledge  of  it  may  be  extended. 
Thus  as  we  look  back  in  time  and  abroad  in  space  over 
those  great  processes  which  in  a  broad  sense  are  making 
and  have  made  man  as  he  is  today,  we,  if  I  may  so, 
determinize  them.  We  know  that  our  knowledge  will 
always  be  all  too  fragmentary  to  admit  of  the  absolute 
determination  of  processes  past,  present,  or  future. 
But  by  a  provisional  determinizing  we  expect  to  con- 
trol our  data  well  enough  to  save  ourselves  from  many 
a  blind  act  in  the  future,  to  save  society  from  many  a 
pathetic  situation. 

How  markedly  Professor  Teggart's  point  of  view 
differs  from  those  which  are  usually  styled  "determin- 
istic" shines  clear  in  his  repudiation  of  necessitarian 
concepts  of  progress,  his  scorn  of  historical  monism 
based  on  our  "Europocentric  tradition,"  his  assertion 
that  history  is  not  to  be  studied  artificially  as  linked 
chains  of  "events"  but  as  "processes"  which  may  yield 
some  answer  to  his  fundamental  question:  "How  has 
man  come  to  be  as  he  is?"  These  "processes"  turn  out 
to  be  something  much  more  complex  than  the  processes 
which  in  our  mechanistic  "natural  sciences"  like  astron- 

[76] 


HISTORY  AND  FREEDOM 


omy  are  brought  under  the  sovereignty  of  mathematics. 
They  are  more  like  those  of  biology  and  sociology 
which  M.  Boutroux  places  so  high  in  his  hierarchy  of 
progressively  non-mechanistic  sciences;  they  are  more 
complex  (as  Professor  Teggart  sees  them)  than  the 
processes  of  Darwinian  biology  with  its  emphasis  on 
continuity  and  gradualness;  they  are  more  clear  than 
the  quilted  stuff  which  masquerades  as  the  stream  of 
group  life  in  that  loose  aggregate  of  information  which 
is  usually  called  "sociology."  A  few  phrases  from  Pro- 
fessor Teggart  will  at  once  make  the  non-mechanistic, 
complex,  and  definite  character  of  these  processes  clear. 
He  finds,  to  be  sure,  that  "Man  is  prone  to  remain  as 
he  is,  to  fixity  in  ideas  and  in  ways  of  doing  things,"  and 
that  "only  through  nature's  insistent  driving  has  he  been 
shaken  out  of  his  immobility  and  set  wayfaring  upon 
the  open  road,"  that  "political  units  have  arisen  at  cer- 
tain definitely  circumscribed  places  .  .  .  not  con- 
sciously selected  or  decided  upon  by  men"  but  deter- 
mined by  the  conformation  of  the  earth's  surface,  that  is 
"by  localization  of  habitable  areas  and  the  possibilities 
of  travel."  But  he  also  shows  the  process  by  which  the 
"comparatively  recent  phenomenon"  of  "political  or- 
ganization" arose  in  a  world  of  primitive  kinship  socie- 
ties and  he  emphasizes  the  crucial  importance  of  a  study 
of  this  startling  transition  which  is  so  significant  for 
us  because  it  has  not  even  today  been  completed  and  just 

[77] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

here  he  gives  us  ample  opportunity  to  reconcile  his  par- 
ticular brand  of  "determinism"  with  a  reverence  for 
moral  autonomy.  It  is  true  that  political  units  have 
appeared,  not  by  voluntary  rejection  of  kinship  organi- 
zations, but  under  stress  of  the  conflict  of  two  races 
brought  into  collision  through  wanderings  which  may 
be  traced  to  harsh  geographical  influences.  But  "the 
cardinal  point  is  that  the  conflict,  in  breaking  up  the 
older  organization,  liberated  the  individual  man,  if 
but  for  a  moment,  from  the  dominance  of  the  group,  its 
observances,  its  formulae,  and  its  ideas."  And  we  may 
add :  this  being  so,  these  individuals  would  more  or  less 
explicitly  formulate  for  themselves  the  principle  of 
moral  autonomy  or  "direct  action,"  which  has  inspired 
them  and  their  successors  from  the  days  when  the  first 
egoistic  warrior-king  urged  it  (perhaps  in  the  form  of 
a  divine  origin  theory)  against  his  enemies  and  his 
weaken  kinsmen,  to  the  days  when  Hume,  Rousseau, 
Adam  Smith,  Thomas  Jefferson,  Thomas  Paine,  and 
Kant  generalized  it  for  democracy,  and  to  the  days 
when  contemporary  trade-unionists  emphasize  it  as  the 
basis  of  emancipating  their  clasas,  their  crafts,  and 
themselves.  In  other  words,  it  is  doubtful  if  primitive 
man  thinks  of  freedom  very  much,  if  at  all,  in  his  kin- 
ship organization,  surrounded  as  he  is  with  taboos;  but, 
as  men  pass  to  political  organization,  more  and  more 
frequently  are  they  fired  with  an  inner  sense  of  freedom. 

[78] 


HISTORY  AND  FREEDOM 


We  are  not  interested  in  the  metaphysical  demonstra- 
bility  of  absolute  "free  will"  or  "determinism;"  we  are 
merely  interested  in  the  question  as  to  whether  that  sub- 
jective sense  of  freedom,  that  "presupposition"  which 
moves  us  in  moments  when  we  have  the  greatest  sense 
of  creativity  and  self-control,  is  at  all  congruous  with 
the  mood  which  investigates  the  problem  of  "how  man 
has  come  to  be  as  he  is." 

Indeed  Professor  Teggart's  argument,  as  he  himself 
insists,  enables  us  to  work  at  last  towards  a  new  and  en- 
lightened individualism  the  moment  we  grasp  the  truth 
that  "throughout  the  past  we  are  presented  with  the 
anomaly  of  men  righting  to  maintain  the  institutional- 
ized vestiges  of  the  self-assertion  of  aggressive  individ- 
uals on  occasions  of  long-past  upheavals."  Surely  this 
intellectual's  view  could  well  serve  to  give  energy  to  the 
proletarian  protesting  against  the  "institutionalized  ves- 
tiges of  the  self-assertion  of  aggressive"  capitalistic  'in- 
dividuals on  occasions  of"  comparatively  recent,  unven- 
erable  "upheavals."  The  oppressed  proletarian  will 
also  be  confirmed  in  his  sense  of  autonomy  to  learn  that 
"the  spirit  of  self-assertion  has  arisen  from  time  to 
time  in  the  subordinate  elements  of  composite  groups." 
Let  Professor  Teggart  proceed  in  order  that  the  joy  of 
syndicalists  and  soviet-leaders  may  be  unconfined. 

"What  we  ordinarily  designate  'constitutional  history'  is  largely  oc- 
cupied with  the  efforts  put  forth  by  one  or  another  element,  class,  or 

[79] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

order  included  within  a  political  group  to  contest  the  dominance  of  a 
ruling  minority,  and  the  theory  of  sovereign  ownership.  From  this 
internal  contest  has  arisen  the  theory  of  individual  'rights'  (of  which 
perhaps  the  most  fundamental  is  that  of  preventing  other  people  from 
interfering  with  a  man's  use  of  his  own  property),  and  the  theory 
that  political  authorities  may  be  tested  and  reformed  in  accordance 
with  current  ideas." 

But  Professor  Teggart's  irrefutable  iconoclasm  only 
begins  here.  He  will  delight  both  militant  proletarians 
and  pioneers  of  the  new  education  with  his  warning 
against  "the  preponderant  disposition  on  the  part  of 
students  of  man  to  regard  the  exterior  rules  and  con- 
ventions, laws  and  social  usages  as  the  essential  matter 
for  consideration."  They  will  jubilate  over  his  scepti- 
cal regard  of  the  "opinion"  of  "legislators,  publicists, 
and  social  workers,"  that  "the  advancement  of  man  is 
to  be  effected  by  the  simple  expedient  of  modifying  the 
existent  regulations." 

Syndicalists  and  pragmatists,  seekers  of  an  alliance 
of  intellectuals  and  wage-workers,  making  rejoinders  to 
the  over-zealous  Marxist  who  belittles  "ideology"  as 
contrasted  with  "economic  causes,"  will  be  interested  in 
Teggart's  acceptance  of  the  "practical  agreement 
among  all  classes  of  investigators,  psychologists,  logic- 
ians, and  anthropologists  that  the  differentia  of  man 
consists  in  his  possession  of  articulate  speech  or  spoken 
language"  not  in  those  materialistic  gifts  and  disposi- 
tions which  "he  shares  in  common  with  his  closest  non- 

[80] 


HISTORY  AND  FREEDOM 


human  relations."  This  leads  our  author  to  the  decis- 
ion that  any  organization  of  the  sciences  of  man  must, 
"if  we  are  to  consider  the  contest  of  life  in  addition  to 
the  exterior  forms  of  human  association  .  .  .  concern 
itself  with  the  factors  and  processes  through  which  the 
idea-systems  of  different  groups  have  come  to  be  as  we 
find  them  today."  From  this  it  is  a  short  step  to  a  com- 
parison and  contrast  between  civilized  and  primitive 
man,  in  which  Professor  Teggart's  sentences  will  serve 
as  excellent  material  for  the  proletarian  in  search  of  the 
motives  conscious  or  unconscious  which  actuate  the 
capitalist,  the  parasitical  artist,  the  bigoted  churchman, 
the  orthodox  educator,  and  the  demagogic  politician, 
who  try  to  keep  us  in  a  state  of  comparative  savagery. 
For,  as  Professor  Teggart  emphasizes,  "primitive  man 
does  not  'think,'  he  performs  definitely  prescribed  ac- 
tions under  the  eye  of  the  community  which,  in  turn,  is 
vitally  concerned  in  the  exactness  with  which  the  repre- 
sentation of  formula  or  ceremony  is  carried  out."  Once 
more,  then,  the  lesson  for  us  is  that  real  progress  im- 
plies autonomy  in  the  face  of  the  widespread  idolatry 
of  conventions.  Thus  in  our  critical  analysis  of  his- 
tory we  come  to  the  history  of  criticism : 

"It  has  been  indicated  that  the  breakdown  of  kindred  organiza- 
tion, following  upon  migration  and  collision,  tended  to  release  the 
individual  from  the  domination  of  the  group,  and  to  create  a  situation 
in  which  personal  initiative  and  self-assertion  became  possible.  It  has 

[81] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

now  to  be  pointed  out  that,  while  this  release  may  be  regarded  as 
affecting  primarily  the  submission  of  the  individual  to  the  mandatory 
authority  of  the  group,  essentially  it  opens  for  the  individual  the 
possibility  of  thinking  for  himself  without  reference  to  group  prece- 
dent. The  emergence  of  individuality,  with  its  accompanying  mani- 
festations of  personal  initiative  and  self-assertion,  is  intimately  asso- 
ciated with  the  beginnings  of  independent  mental  activity,  of  thinking, 
which  may  lead  the  individual  to  question  the  validity  of  inherited 
group  ideas. 

"This  striking  result,  it  must  be  understood,  is  not  achieved  by  the 
individual  of  his  own  volition  or  accord;  it  is  thrust  upon  him  by  the 
force  of  circumstances.  To  make  the  point  clear,  we  may  say,  specu- 
latively,  that  had  there  ever  been  but  one  system  of  ideas  common  to 
all  men,  advancement  would  have  been  impossible,  for  progress  in 
ideas  springs  from  comparison,  and  a  sense  of  difference  could  not  arise 
from  contemplation  of  different  instances  of  the  same  thing.  Con- 
versely, the  critical  spirit  is  easily  enough  aroused  by  the  juxtaposition 
of  different  means  for  attaining  the  same  end;  so  that  different  ob- 
servances for  effecting  the  same  result,  different  mythological  ex- 
planations of  the  same  phenomena,  when  brought  into  contact,  may 
be  expected  to  lead  to  questioning  and  comparisons. 

"That  some  such  path  has  actually  been  followed  in  the  past 
seems  clear.  Ernst  Curtius  pointed  out,  long  ago,  that  the  influence 
of  sea-navigation  upon  the  development  of  the  Greeks  has  been  very 
marked,  as  it  suddenly  brought  face  to  face  men  who  had  been  living 
under  widely  different  conditions,  and  hence  induced  an  endless 
comparing,  learning  and  teaching. 

How  easily  we  may  add  to  Professor  Teggart's  example 
of  the  development  of  the  Greeks  and  to  the  others 
which  follow  in  his  book  the  example  of  the  develop- 
ment of  trade-unions !  And  we  may  do  well,  as  we  read 

[82] 


HISTORY  AND  FREEDOM 


the  following  sentences,  to  think  of  the  Mexicans,  Afri- 
cans, Japanese,  Italians,  Slavs,  Celts  and  other  races  in 
America  mingling  in  the  hop-fields,  the  textile-mills, 
and  the  packing-houses,  and  learning  to  unite  and  assert 
their  new  convictions  against  captains  of  industry  and 
employers'  associations. 

"The  important  point  is  that  different  ideas  in  regard  to  the  same 
subject,  when  maintained  in  opposition  by  members  of  the  same 
group,  necessarily  evoke  comparison  and  critical  discussion.  The 
outcome  of  this  is  not  always,  nor  even  generally,  a  choice  between 
two  alternatives,  for  the  debate  will  leave  neither  of  the  original 
positions  wholly  unchanged,  and  hence  a  new  idea-system  will  arise 
which  is  not  a  selection  of  materials  drawn  from  various  sources, 
but  a  resultant  of  the  juxtaposition  of  different  bodies  of  thought.  .  .  . 

"In  confirmation  of  the  hypothesis  that  the  changes  which  have  con- 
tributed to  human  advancement  have  ensued  from  the  collision  of 
groups  from  widely  different  habitats,  and  hence  of  different  idea- 
systems,  we  may  point  to  the  initial  stages  of  those  great  outbursts  of 
intellectual  activity  which  have  distinguished  every  people  which  has 
risen  above  the  level  of  primitive  man.  So,  the  historian  of  China 
is  forced  to  repeat,  from  chapter  to  chapter,  the  formula:  'first  the 
successful  invasion,  the  destruction  of  the  old  power,  and  then  the 
formation  of  new  nations,  governments,  and  types  of  men,'  and  the 
summary  of  results  in  each  case  is  typified  in  the  statement  that  'not 
the  least  of  the  Mongols'  gifts  to  China  was  the  stimulus  and  fertili- 
zation of  the  native  intellect  in  the  domain  of  the  imagination.' 
Similarly,  Vincent  Smith,  the  latest  historian  of  India  remarks  that 
'the  rule  of  the  able  and  long-lived  monarchs  of  the  Gupta  dynasty 
coincided  with  an  extraordinary  outburst  of  intellectual  activity  of 
all  kinds.  The  personal  patronage  of  the  kings,  no  doubt,  has  some 

[83] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

effect,  but  deeper  causes  must  have  been  at  work  to  produce  such 
results.  Experience  proves  that  the  contact  or  collision  of  diverse 
modes  of  civilization  is  the  most  potent  stimulus  to  intellectual  and 
artistic  progress,  and,  in  my  opinion,  the  eminent  achievements  of 
the  Gupta  period  are  mainly  due  to  such  contact  with  foreign  civil- 
izations, both  on  the  east  and  on  the  west.'  Again  the  entire  history 
of  Babylonia  and  Assyria  is  an  epitome  of  such  situations,  and  this 
leads  a  recent  historian  to  observe:  'It  may  be  put  down  as  an  axiom 
that  nowhere  does  a  high  form  of  culture  arise  without  the  com- 
mingling of  diverse  elements.'  'The  Euphrates  valley  from  the  time 
it  looms  upon  the  historical  horizon,'  he  continues,  'is  the  seat  of  a 
mixed  population.  Egyptian  culture  is  the-  outcome  of  the  mixture 
of  Semitic  with  Hamitic  elements.  Civilization  begins  in  Greece 
with  the  movements  of  Asiatic  peoples,  partly  at  least  non-Aryan, 
across  the  Agean  sea.  In  Rome  we  find  the  old  Aryan  stock  mixed 
with  a  strange  element  known  as  Etruscan.  In  modern  times,  France, 
Germany  and  England  furnish  illustrations  of  the  process  of  the  com- 
mingling of  diverse  ethnic  elements  leading  to  advanced  forms  of 
civilization.'  Ultimately,  attention  may  be  called  to  Petrie's  con- 
clusion in  his  memorable  study  of  The  Revolutions  of  Civilization 
that  'every  civilization  of  a  settled  population  tends  to  incessant  decay 
from-  its  maximum  condition ;  and  this  decay  continues  until  it  is 
too  weak  to  initiate  anything,  when  a  fresh  comes  in,  and  utilizes  the 
old  stock  to  graft  on,  both  in  blood  and  culture.  As  soon  as  the  mix- 
ture is  well  started,  it  rapidly  grows  on  the  old  soil,  and  pro- 
duces a  new  wave  of  civilization.  There  is  no  new  generation  with- 
out a  mixture  of  blood,  parthenogenesis  is  unknown  in  the  birth  of 
nations." 

It  is  perhaps  most  significant  of  all  for  our  conten- 
tion that  Professor  Teggart's  large  "determinism"  is 
perfectly  congruous  with  our  emphasis  of  autonomy,  of 


HISTORY  AND  FREEDOM 


the  capture  of  self-control,  of  Freudian  "sublimation" 
that  he  firmly  repudiates  any  notion  that  his  theory  of 
migrations,  collisions,  and  the  release  of  individual 
idea-systems  implies  the  permanent  necessity  of  war  as 
a  goad  to  progress.  We  have  but  to  master  a  scientific 
outlook  over  the  panorama  of  the  centuries  and  its 
meaning  for  us,  so  Teggart  thinks,  we  have  but  "to  un- 
derstand the  elements  of  history"  and  we  can  to  a  con- 
siderable extent  control  them.  Even  though  "progress 
is  exceptional"  and  "fixity  and  stagnation"  all  but  "uni- 
versal" we  are  thus  given  the  talisman  to  make  progress 
more  frequent,  more  self-conscious.  So,  just  as  the  so- 
cialist has  come  to  smooth  out  the  angularities  of  his 
ecstatic  fatalism  over  the  "class-war"  and  the  "dictator- 
ship of  the  proletariat"  and  has  more  and  more  prog- 
nosticated the  dissolution  of  all  fortuitous  classes  so  we 
may  plan  more  and  more  sophisticated  stimuli  for  "re- 
leases"— we  may  learn  to  Induce  releases  by  methods 
more  humane  than  the  wars  of  political  states  or  of 
economic  classes.  And  if  "releases"  are  bound  to  be 
"catastrophic"  we  may  yet  discover  how  to  manage  cat- 
astrophic changes  so  that  they  will  not  unnerve  us,  as 
they  do  now  in  the  days  of  the  Bolsheviki  when  fear 
breeds  such  tragic  hysteria  among  our  western  conser- 
vatives. ^ 
With  our  gain  in  the  knowledge  of  man's  ways  we 
will  also  be  less  fatalistic  over  the  fact  that  there  have 

[85] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

always  been,  and  perhaps  always  will  be,  "some  in- 
dividuals with  greater  personal  initiative  than  the  ma- 
jority of  their  fellows."  We  may  get  the  best  from 
these  "geniuses"  and  aid  them  to  the  richest  and  truest 
self-expression  without  allowing  them  to  oppress  us.  It 
is  interesting  to  remember  in  this  connection  that,  at 
the  other  end  of  the  scale,  the  feeble-minded,  the  psyco- 
paths,  and  the  insane  are  differently  treated  today  by 
the  psychiatrists.  Once  the  criminologist  did  little 
more  than  preach  the  negative  doctrines  of  segrega- 
tion and  sterilization.  Now,  while  he  quite  properly 
continues  to  preach  these,  he  adds  positive  programs 
that  these  unfortunates  may  in  their  segregation  have 
the  fullest  possible  self-expression.  Study  not  the 
crime  in  abstraction,  he  says,  but  the  individual  as  a 
concrete  whole.  And  the  psychoanalysts  are  showing 
us  that  the  class-war  that  rages  within  each  of  us  is 
not  to  be  successfully  consummated  by  automatic  sup- 
pressions, but  by  democratic  reconciliations  of  con- 
flicting impulses.  Truly  equalitarianism  gains  apace, 
despite  the  awful  rack  of  the  Industrial  Revolution 
and  the  grim  findings  of  biology;  the  dreams  of  Locke 
and  Jefferson,  Shelley  and  Marx  and  William  Morris 
have  not  been  dreamed  in  vain. 

But  it  is  high  time  that  we  refrained  from  our  ap- 
plications and  reconciliations  and  gave  Professor  Teg- 
gart  the  floor  for  a  detailed  sketch  of  his  great  synthesis. 

[86] 


HISTORY  AND  FREEDOM 


"The  scientific  student  of  human  history  cannot  accept  Darwin's 
assumptions  and  procedure  as  a  model  upon  which  to  pattern  his  in- 
quiry, but  he  is  not,  therefore,  left  without  guidance.  An  alterna- 
tive method  for  approaching  the  investigation  of  how  things  have  come 
to  be  as  they  are  was  suggested  by  Huxley.  The  great  exponent  of 
Darwinism  pointed  out  that  any  hypothesis  of  progressive  modification 
must  take  into  consideration  the  fact  of  persistence  without  pro- 
gression through  indefinite  periods,  and,  furthermore,  urged  upon 
Darwin's  attention  the  possibility  of  occasional  'rapid  leaps'  or  changes 
in  nature.  In  short,  Huxley  recognized  three  different  sets  of  pro- 
cesses as  contributory  to  the  emergence  of  the  present  status:  first, 
those  represented  in  fixity,  stability  or  persistence;  second,  those 
manifested  in  slow  continuous  modifications;  and,  third,  those  re- 
vealed in  explicit  changes  or  events. 

"In  later  discussion  the  elements  unrecognized  by  Darwin  have 
more  and  more  forced  themselves  into  the  foreground  of  debate, 
and  have  colored  the  views  held  by  all  investigators.  Thus  De  Vries 
supposed  that  after  periods  of  relative  fixity,  during  which  they  are 
subject  only  to  fluctuating  variations,  living  beings  may  pass  through 
shorter  periods  when  their  forms  are  abruptly  modified  in  different 
directions  by  discontinuous  changes.  So,  too,  George  Darwin  ex- 
pressed the  opinion  that  the  study  of  stability  and  instability  furnishes 
the  problems  which  the  physicist  and  biologist  alike  attempt  to  solve, 
and  he  envisaged  the  course  of  'evolution,'  not  as  uniform  and  slow, 
but  as  divided  between  a  sequence  of  slight  continuous  modifica- 
tions accumulating  through  a  long  period,  and  somewhat  sudden  trans- 
formations which  would  appear  as  historical  events.  Again,  his 
brother,  Francis  Darwin,  regarded  'evolution,'  not  as  a  process  of 
modification,  but  as  a  process  of  drilling  organisms  into  habits,  and 
thought  of  an  organism  as  a  machine  in  which  energy  can  be  set  free  by 
some  kind  of  releasing  mechanism.  This  latter  idea  .  .  .  has  been  car- 

[87] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

ried  further  by  William  Bateson,  who  also  believes  that  variation 
occurs  as  a  definite  event,  and  that  we  can  see  no  changes  in  progress 
around  us  in  the  contemporary  world  which  can  be  imagined  likely  to 
culminate  in  the  evolution  of  forms  distinct  in  the  larger  sense. 
Finally,  not  to  multiply  instances  unnecessarily,  the  essential  features 
of  what  I  have  called  the  alternative  mode  of  approach  is  brought  out 
by  Hans  Gadow  in  asking  why  it  is  that  mammalian  material  can 
produce  what  is  denied  to  the  lower  classes.  Why  have  they  not  all 
by  this  time  reached  the  same  grade  of  perfection  ?  'Because,'  he  says, 
'every  new  group  is  less  hampered  by  tradition,  much  of  which  must 
be  discarded  by  the  new  departure,  and  some  of  its  energy  is  set 
free  to  follow  up  this  new  course,  straight,  with  ever-growing  results, 
until  in  its  turn  this  becomes  an  old  rut  out  of  which  a  new  jolt 
leads  once  more  into  fresh  fields.' 


"The  savage  is  completely  hedged  about  by  conventions,  at  once 
minute  and  obligatory,  the  violation  of  which  is  attended  by  drastic 
penalties.  Hence,  as  McDougall  remarks,  'in  primitive  societies  the 
precision  of  the  customary  code  and  the  exact  coincidence  of  public 
opinion  with  the  code,  allow  no  occasion  for  deliberation  upon  con- 
duct, nor  scope  for  individual  judgment  and  choice.'  'We  see  the 
same  result  among  all  savage  communities  still  existing  on  the  earth, 
and  among  all  peoples  of  whom  we  have  any  record  at  the  dawn  of 
civilization.  Their  actions,  whether  individual  or  collective,  are 
hampered,  controlled,  or  enforced  at  every  step  by  custom.'  It  is, 
unquestionably,  due  to  this  rigid  enforcement  of  custom  that  the 
lower  groups  have  remained  for  long  periods  of  time  in  a  fixed  or 
stationary  condition,  that  their  manners,  customs,  and  modes  of  life 
have  continued  almost  unaltered  for  generations. 

"While,  however,  the  discipline  of  the  individual  by  the  group 
may  be  more  immediately  apparent  in  groups  less  advanced  than  our 

[88] 


HISTORY  AND  FREEDOM 


own,  the  same  process  is  visibly  operative  in  modern  life.  For,  in- 
deed, what  we  mean  by  'civilization'  and  'culture'  is  neither  more 
nor  less  than  the  store  of  ideas,  beliefs,  conventional  opinions,  and 
tastes  which  is  transmitted  from  each  generation  to  the  next,  and  into 
which  each  member  of  the  community  is  inducted  by  his  elders. 
And  while  the  modern  teacher,  but  recently  become  self-conscious 
of  his  function,  has  much  to  say  of  the  responsibility  of  the  com- 
munity for  the  'education'  of  the  child,  there  has  been,  as  Cook  re- 
marks, a  pretty  successful  education  of  the  race  from  the  days  of 
the  primitive  prehistoric  man.  It  is  but  formulating  the  practice  of 
the  ages  to  say  that  the  resources  of  government  and  law,  religion 
and  morality,  must  be  enlisted  to  constrain  the  individual  in  order  to 
procure  a  common  likeness  in  impulses,  habits,  and  ideas  within  the 
group. 

"It  follows  from  this  unsought  initiation  into  the  idea-system  of 
his  ancestors  that,  even  in  the  most  backward  group,  the  individual 
enters  upon  life  at  a  relatively  high  stage  of  human  advancement; 
he  stands  upon  a  platform  which  has  been  laboriously  constructed 
by  his  unremembered  predecessors.  At  the  same  time,  it  must  be 
recognized  that,  even  in  the  most  advanced  groups,  this  initiation 
imposes  severe  limitations.  At  best,  the  platform  is  narrow;  and  the 
individual  acquires  habits  of  thought  and  a  fixity  of  ideas  which  ren- 
der him  unduly  tenacious  of  what  has  been  inculcated  in  him,  and 
unduly  suspicious  and  obstinate  in  presence  of  what  may  appear  to 
him  to  be  different  or  new.  While,  then,  the  educative  discipline 
tends  to  preserve  what  has  been  acquired,  it  presents  a  very  real 
obstacle  to  further  advance.  In  face  of  this  consideration,  the  theory 
commonly  expressed,  that  the  'inheritance  of  the  permanent  achieve- 
ments of  one  generation  by  the  next  is  the  main  factor  of  progress,' 
that,  in  fact,  human  advancement  has  been  due  to  the  maintenance  of 
tradition,  to  the  drilling  through  which  the  individual  has  been  put 

[89] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

in  possession  of  the  acquisition  of  the  group,  will  be  seen  to  express 
but  a  partial  truth,  for  if  this  process  had  been  the  only  one  in 
operation,  advancement  would,  manifestly,  have  been  impossible. 

"The  processes  of  modification  are  of  various  types  and  these  are 
of  varying  degrees  of  influence.  In  the  first  place,  we  may  readily 
see  that  while  the  initial  discipline  of  any  two  individuals  may  pro- 
ceed along  the  same  lines,  and  while  their  lives  may  be  led  in  the 
same  surroundings,  their  experiences  in  life  will  never  be  identical, 
and  in  maturity  their  responses  to  any  given  excitation  will  not  be 
exactly  the  same.  The  difference  of  response  will  be  all  the  greater 
if  the  lives  of  the  two  men  have  been  passed  in  different  circum- 
stances. Again,  while  every  member  of  a  primitive  group  is  drilled  in 
its  traditional  observances  and  customs,  the  performances  of  these 
obligatory  acts  cannot  be  identically  transmitted  from  generation  to 
generation;  unconsciously  and  unobserved,  modifications  will  creep 
in.  This  is  true  even  in  respect  to  verbal  formula;,  the  value  of  which 
is  believed  to  reside  in  their  exact  repetition,  for  here,  in  addition  to 
the  possible  treacheries  of  memory,  the  reproduction  will  be  affected 
by  the  unceasing  modifications  in  the  use  of  words.  Language,  in- 
deed, provides  in  itself  a  perfect  illustration  of  the  fact  that  use  entails 
wear,  and  it  is  in  a  language  that  the  processes  of  modification  have 
been  most  carefully  observed. 

"Despite  the  prepossessions  we  unconsciously  absorb  from  an  ac- 
quaintance with  biological  discussions,  we  must  avoid  the  assumption 
that  human  history  displays  any  such  regular  and  even  process  of 
change  as  is  postulated  in  the  Darwinian  conception  of  'evolution.' 
This  supposition  leads  inevitably  to  theories  of  slow  unbroken  prog- 
ress directed  towards  some  determinable  end,  but  the  evidence  before 
us  provides  no  basis  for  optimistic  philosophizing.  What  we  find 

[90] 


HISTORY  AND  FREEDOM 


actually  throughout  the  course  of  history  are  the  unmistakable  results 
of  constant  processes  manifested  in  fixity  or  persistence,  tempered 
by  other  processes  which  gradually  effect  a  modification  of  this 
rigidity.  In  addition  to  these  two  sets  of  processes,  however,  there  is 
abundant  evidence  of  the  fact  that  at  different  times  and  in  different 
places  certain  events  have  led  to  significant  changes  in  the  groups 
affected,  and  that  these  changes  stand  in  direct  relation  to  the  phe- 
nomenon of  'advance.' 

"Investigation  in  different  fields  of  the  study  of  man  has  led 
many  contemporary  scholars — Petrie,  Haddon,  Rivers,  Mackinder, 
Hogarth,  Myres,  Temple,  Balfour,  Smith,  Hall,  Jastrow,  Sollas,  to 
mention  but  a  few — to  observe  that  human  advancement  has  followed 
upon  the  collision  of  different  groups.  Pieced  together,  the  con- 
clusions arrived  at  so  far  may  be  summarized  in  the  statement  that 
definite  advance  has  taken  place  in  the  past  when  a  group,  forced 
from  its  habitat,  ultimately  by  a  change  of  climate,  has  been  brought 
into  collision  with  another  differing  from  it  considerably  in  culture, 
and  has  remained  upon  the  invaded  territory  .  .  . 

"It  is  only  when  we  take  a  further  step,  and  come  to  ask  how 
conceivably  usurpation  of  territory,  or  war,  or  admixture  of  peoples 
could  affect  intellectual  advancement,  that  the  underlying  problem  is 
brought  to  light.  It  cannot  well  be  assumed  that  either  the  inter- 
marriage of  differing  stocks  or  the  struggle  of  battle  will  of  itself 
bring  about  this  result;  and  while  it  is  said  that  'if  you  want  to 
change  a  man's  opinions — transplant  him,  it  does  not  follow  that  the 
change  will  be  effected  by  the  scenery.  In  short,  the  'change'  that 
leads  to  advancement  is  mental.  What,  then,  is  of  importance  to 
notice  is  that  when  enforced  migration  is  followed  by  collision,  and 
this  by  the  alien  occupation  of  territory,  there  ensues  as  a  result  of 
the  conflict  the  breaking  down  or  subversion  of  the  established  idea- 
system  of  the  groups  involved  in  the  struggle.  The  breakdown  of 

[91] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

the  old  and  unquestioned  system  of  ideas,  though  it  may  be  felt  as  a 
public  calamity  and  a  personal  loss,  accomplishes  the  release  of  the 
individual  mind  from  the  set  forms  in  which  it  has  been  drilled, 
and  leaves  men  opportunity  to  build  up  a  system  for  themselves  anew. 
This  new  idea-system  will  certainly  contain  old  elements,  but  it  will 
not  be  like  the  old,  for  the  consolidated  group,  confronted  with  con- 
flicting bodies  of  knowledge,  of  observances  and  of  interpretations,  will 
experience  a  critical  awakening,  and  open  wondering  eyes  upon  a  new 
world.  Thus  it  is  not  the  physical  contact  of  men  that  is  of  supreme 
importance  in  human  advancement,  but  the  overthrow  of  the  domi- 
nance of  the  traditional  system  in  which  the  individuals  composing 
the  group  have  been  trained,  and  which  they  have  unconditionally 
accepted;  though  advancement  seems  rarely  to  have  been  possible, 
in  the  past,  save  when  diverse  groups  have  been  set  face  to  face  in 
uesperate  struggle. 

"Here,  then,  is  a  process  which  differs  essentially  from  those  pre- 
viously described,  for  it  is  manifested  only  when  some  exterior  dis- 
turbance or  shock  has,  for  the  time  being,  weakened  or  overcome  the 
influence  or  effect  of  the  previously  described  process;  when  mani- 
fested, however,  this  process  is  the  same  in  all  cases.  The  hypothesis 
required  may  now  be  stated  in  the  form  that  human  advancement 
follows  upon  the  mental  release,  of  the  members  of  a  group  or  of  a 
single  individual,  from  the  authority  of  an  established  system  of 
ideas.  This  release  has,  in  the  past,  been  occasioned  through  the 
breaking  down  of  previous  idea-systems  by  prolonged  struggles  be- 
tween opposing  groups  which  have  been  brought  into  conflict  as  a  re- 
sult of  the  involuntary  movements  of  peoples.  What  follows  is  the 
building  up  of  a  new  idea-system,  which  is  not  a  simple  cumulation  of 
the  knowledge  previously  accepted,  but  the  product  of  critical  ac- 
tivity stirred  by  the  perception  of  conflicting  elements  in  the  opposed 
idea-systems. 

•  ••••••••• 

[92] 


HISTORY  AND  FREEDOM 


"In  modern  groups,  the  participation  of  the  individual  in  the 
group  idea-system  is  irregular  and  incomplete,  and  .  .  .  under 
actual  conditions  each  member  of  a  given  community  acquires  a 
personal  system  of  ideas  which  differs  considerably  from  that  of  his 
fellows,  though  drawn  from  the  same  source.  As  a  consequence, 
the  contact  of  individuals,  being  accompanied  by  the  interchange  of 
differing  personal  views,  leads  to  a  continual  criticism  and  modifi- 
cation of  our  outlook  upon  the  world;  and,  indeed,  the  attitude 
which  we  regarded  as  specifically  characteristic  of  members  of  ad- 
vanced groups  is  a  wide  tolerance  of  these  differences  in  ideas,  and  a 
conscious  admission  of  the  merely  tentative  validity  of  our  most 
cherished  convictions. 


"I  have  indicated  that,  throughout  the  past,  human  advancement 
ha»,  to  a  marked  degree,  been  dependent  upon  war.  From  this  cir- 
cumstance, many  investigators  have  inferred  that  war  is,  in  itself,  a 
blessing — however  greatly  disguised.  We  may  see,  however,  that 
this  judgment  is  based  upon  observations  which  have  not  been  pressed 
far  enough  to  elicit  a  scientific  explanation.  War  has  been,  times 
without  number,  the  antecedent  of  advance,  but  in  other  cases,  such 
as  the  introduction  of  Buddhism  into  China,  the  same  result  has 
followed  upon  the  acceptance  of  new  ideas  without  the  introductory 
formality  of  bitter  strife.  As  long,  indeed,  as  we  continue  to  hold 
tenaciously  to  customary  ideas  and  ways  of  doing  things,  so  long  must 
we  live  in  anticipation  of  the  conflict  which  this  persistence  must 
inevitably  induce. 

"It  requires  no  lengthy  exposition  to  demonstrate  that  the  ideas 
which  lead  to  strife,  civil  or  international,  are  not  the  products  of  the 
highest  knowledge  available,  are  not  the  verified  results  of  scientific 
inquiry,  but  are  'opinions'  about  matters  which,  at  the  moment,  we 
do  not  fully  understand.  Among  modern  peoples,  the  most  important 

[93] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

of  these  opinions  are  concerned  with  the  ordering  of  human  affairs ; 
and  in  this  area  all  our  'settlements'  of  the  problems  which  confront 
us  must  continue  to  be  temporary  and  uncertain  compromises  until  we 
shall  have  come  to  apply  the  method  of  science  in  their  solution. 
Science  is  not  a  body  of  beliefs  and  opinions,  but  is  a  way  or  method 
of  dealing  with  problems.  It  has  been  said  by  a  notable  contemporary 
that  men  begin  the  search  for  truth  with  fancy,  after  that  they  argue, 
and  at  length  they  try  to  find  out.  Scientific  method  is  the  term  we  use 
for  the  orderly  and  systematic  effort  to  find  out.  Hitherto,  the 
most  serious  affairs  of  men  have  been  decided  upon  the  basis  of  argu- 
mentation, carried,  not  infrequently,  to  the  utmost  limits  of  destruc- 
tion and  death.  It  should  be  possible  to  apply  in  this  domain  the 
method  of  finding  out,  and  it  has  been  my  hope  to  contribute,  in 
however  tentative  a  manner,  to  this  end." 

In  sketching  the  history  of  any  great  tendency  of  the 
last  two  hundred  years,  in  considering  the  modern 
aspects  of  the  momentous  transition  from  kinship  soci- 
eties to  territorial  societies  (political  states)  concerning 
which  Teggart  has  written  so  profoundly,  we  must  al- 
ways visualize  two  great  synchronous  wars,  wars  which 
have  their  systole  and  their  diastole,  but  which  have 
been  all  but  continuous:  the  war  of  the  modern  nation 
and  empire  makers  and  the  war  of  economic  classes. 
To  attempt  to  think  in  this  way  seems  at  first  to  court 
the  confusion  of  Babel.  But  many  tragic  misunder- 
standings, many  tragic  overemphases,  diplomatic 
errors,  military  mistakes,  imprisonings  just  and  unjust, 
riots  and  alarms  and  lynchings,  hectic  debates,  suicides, 
disgraces  are  today  swarming  because  of  our  inability 

[94] 


HISTORY  AND  FREEDOM 


to  recognize  and  to  think  and  act  implacably,  cour- 
ageously, unequivocally,  critically  and  constructively, 
in  relation  to  both  of  these  wars  at  the  same  time.  And 
those  who  are  destined  to  win  the  great  diplomatic  and 
military  and  economic  victories  of  the  immediate 
future,  will  be  those  who  can  think  with  the  least  em- 
barrassment and  act  with  the  greatest  decisiveness  and 
complexity  in  the  two  wars.  You  can  neglect  neither. 
You  can  wish  away  neither  to  any  purpose.  You  can 
underemphasize  neither.  The  "pacifist"  shrinks  away 
too  much  from  the  one  or  the  other  or  both.  The  angry 
hand  of  the  chauvinist  trembles  too  much. 

In  sketching  the  history  of  any  great  tendency  of 
the  last  two  hundred  years  we  must,  moreover,  look 
not  only  at  the  two  processes  which  we  have  described 
as  two  synchronous  wars,  but  also  at  the  process  which 
is  a  progressive  dissemination  of  the  sense  of  freedom 
among  all  kinds  and  conditions  of  individuals  as  in- 
dividuals. This  is  to  take  the  view  of  evolutionary  ex- 
perimentation, which  is,  in  a  number  of  variations,  the 
view  of  Dewey,  McDougall,  Boutroux,  Freud  and 
Teggart,  the  view,  indeed,  of  many  other  brilliant  for- 
ward-looking thinkers  whom  we  cannot  hope  to  assem- 
ble here.  This  doctrine  of  evolutionary  experimental- 
ism,  a  doctrine  of  the  probably  discontinuous,  but  as- 
suredly progressive  spreading  and  intensification  of 
autonomous  self-confidence,  self-conquest,  self-develop- 

[95] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

ment,  i.e.,  sublimation,  is  brilliantly  confirmed  by  an 
examination  of  the  particular  processes  in  the  labor- 
movement.  History  is  the  orderly  study  of  the  hitherto 
almost  purely  accidental  release  of  freedom  with  a  view 
to  making  freedom  universal.  History,  in  other  words, 
records  the  tremendous  influences  of  circumstances  on 
man,  but  also  man's  own  gropings  as  a  race  and  as  an 
individual,  towards  that  free  reconciliation  of  his  own 
inner  conflicts  of  desires,  and  the  conflicts  of  his  desires 
with  circumstances,  which  we  call  psychoanalysis. 

Professor  Teggart's  book  closes  with  a  general  ex- 
pression of  hope  that  the  "release"  may  ultimately  be  so 
understood  and  controlled,  as  to  yield  to  the  individual 
all  the  joys  of  "advancement"  without  the  horrors  of 
violent  collision  as  a  necessary  concomitant.  Just  here 
psychoanalysis  can  supply  for  Professor  Teggart  many 
of  the  details.  It  has  elaborated  a  technique  for  so  aid- 
ing the  "release"  in  each  individual  as  to  grant  him 
the  full  measure  of  healthy  emancipation  without  the 
curse  of  violence.  And  psychoanalysis  lifts  the  "in- 
ertia" which  is  the  curse  of  what,  with  a  blasphemous 
disregard  of  the  etymology  of  the  word,  we  furnish  our 
youth  as  "education." 


[96] 


VI 
LIBERTY 

In  France  during  the  French  Revolution  there  was 
a  good  deal  of  talk  about  giving  people  liberty — and 
there  was  the  guillotine.  In  the  United  States  today 
we  talk  much  of  the  land  of  liberty  and  we  allow  at 
large  prominent  men  whom  competent  psychiatrists 
would  certainly  classify  as  paranoiacs,  while  we  im- 
prison certain  individuals  because  they  are  altogether 
too  much  like  Jesus  Christ.  The  reason  why  eighteenth 
century  France  and  twentieth  century  America  fell 
into  such  tragic  equivocations  is  because  neither  coun- 
try faced  with  sufficient  courage  the  great  law  that  no- 
body can  grant  liberty  to  any  one  except  to  himself. 
Russia  has  faced  this,  sublimely  non-resistant  before  a 
great  real  principle  of  life. 

It  is  fair,  apparently,  to  say  that  the  discovery  of  the 
moral  autonomy  of  the  individual  is  the  supreme  dis- 
covery of  modern  human  thought.  Undoubtedly  al- 
most every  primitive  warrior-king,  who  experienced 
"release"  in  the  trial  and  error  transition  from  the 
kinship  society  to  the  political  state,  articulated  for  his 
exclusive  self  some  version  of  the  doctrine  of  moral 

[97] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

autonomy.  All  the  great  religious  seers,  notably 
Buddha  and  Christ,  have  discovered  it  for  themselves 
whether  they  preached  it  or  not.  In  the  seventeenth 
century  Descartes  practised  autonomy,  very  shrewdly, 
without  preaching  it  at  all,  except  in  a  vague  odor  of 
theology.  In  the  same  century  even  as  thoughtless  a 
person  as  Lovelace,  the  cavalier,  realized  for  a  moment 
of  lyrical  breathlessness,  that  "stone  walls  do  not  a 
prison  make"  for  a  man  who  is  free.  In  the  same  cen- 
tury John  Bunyan,  by  virtue  of  a  sort  of  psychoanalysis 
of  himself  that  anticipates  the  rougher  features  of  the 
intricate  and  subtle  Freudian  tactic,  gradually  re- 
lieved himself  of  most  of  the  conflicts  within  him- 
self which  imprisoned  him,  and  finally  sublimated 
his  somewhat  morbid  and  decidedly  infantile  im- 
pulses to  lie  and  swear,  by  writing  in  prison  a  sublime 
lie  and  truth  called  Pilgrim's  Progress.  One  could 
multiply  from  the  seventeenth  century,  wherein 
modern  thought  begins,  examples  of  humble  in- 
dividuals, no  longer  kings,  who  found  out  for  them- 
selves the  principle  of  moral  autonomy.  But  it  took 
another  century  to  formulate  it  as  a  universal  prin- 
ciple for  all  men.  This  is  the  greatest  achieve- 
ment of  Immanuel  Kant.  But  his  version  of  it 
reeks  of  the  study.  And  his  elaboration  of  it  was 
often  all  but  a  denial  of  it.  We  had  to  wait  another 
century  for  a  bolder  and  more  popular  generalization 

[98] 


LIBERTY 

of  moral  autonomy  by  the  French  syndicalists,  that  is 
the  French  syndicalists  of  the  proletariat,  not  of  the 
parlor.  From  the  various  strictly  proletarian  phras- 
ings  of  it  we  may  select  the  version  by  Pouget. 

"Direct  action  means  this:  the  workers  struggling 
constantly  with  their  present  environment,  no  longer 
expect  anything  from  men,  powers  or  forces  outside 
of  their  own  ranks.  It  means  that,  against  our  present 
society,  which  only  knows  'citizen,'  a  new  society  is 
rising,  made  up  of  'producers.'  The  producers,  realiz- 
ing that  the  social  body  is  shaped  by  its  system  of  pro- 
duction, intend  to  transform  entirely  the  capitalistic 
mode  of  production,  to  eliminate  the  employers  and 
thereby  to  conquer  industrial  freedom.  Direct  action 
means  that  the  working-classes  recognize  the  principle 
of  freedom  and  autonomy  instead  of  bowing  to  the 
principle  of  authority." 

And  now,  to  cap  the  climax,  the  most  quiet  and  fun- 
damental of  rebels,  Freud,  has  developed  an  elaborate 
scientific  technique  to  verify  the  essence  of  freedom  as 
non-resistance.  Proletarians  may,  on  the  impulse,  cry 
out  that  this  Viennese  intellectual,  with  his  talk  of 
non-resistance,  can  be  no  ally  of  theirs.  But  hold.  Let 
them  examine  their  own  "sabotage."  They  begin  by 
resistance,  by  putting  emery  in  the  oil  cups,  by  "going 
slow  on  the  job."  But  at  best  by  this  resistance  they 
confer  on  themselves  merely  a  phantom  of  liberty  and 

[99] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

a  phantom  already  on  the  wing.  As  Mr.  Ordway  Tead 
has  pointed  out  in  his  Instincts  in  Industry,  such  sabo- 
tage arouses  in  the  sinners  themselves  an  "antipathy" 
which  "reveals  in  its  true  light  the  vigor  of  the  con- 
structive impulse."  The  resistance  by  crude  sabotage, 
then,  is  a  resistance  to  one's  own  inner  nature  and, 
therefore,  cannot  confer  liberty.  Workmen  soon  dis- 
cover this  and  try  a  new  tack.  They  decide  not  to 
break,  but  to  obey  all  the  petty  laws  with  which  the 
employer  lends  respectability  to  his  business.  But  the 
employer  does  not  expect  them  to  obey  these  laws. 
To  obey  them,  as  on  the  railroads,  will  preserve  the 
workmen  from  accident,  but  it  will  tie  up  the  traffic. 
But  the  workmen  decide  to  obey  them.  That  is,  they 
decide  upon  non-resistance.  The  traffic  is  tied  up. 
Employers  become  humble.  Through  non-resistance 
the  workers  find  freedom,  confer  liberty  upon  them- 
selves. In  other  words,  they  have  blundered  into  the 
Freudian  technique  of  non-resistance.  Like  John  Bun- 
yan  they  are  rough  and  ready  psychoanalysts.  Real 
non-resistance,  i.e.  the  refusal  to  resist  one's  own  best 
self,  is  not  a  passive  but  a  militant  trait  that  often  in- 
volves the  sternest  defiance  of  the  community.  The 
greatest  moments  of  the  Russian  revolution,  from  the 
first  act  to  the  brilliant  Bolshevik  coup,  prove,  as  our 
real  knowledge  of  them  accumulates,  to  be  gigantic 
mass-acts  of  non-resistance,  non-resistance  to  truth,  jus- 


LIBERTY 

tice,  love.  Through  non-resistance  to  those  deeper 
laws  of  his  temperament  which  convention  bids  him 
silence,  thus  alone  the  individual  discovers  freedom  and 
confers  liberty  upon  himself. 

Thus,  by  armies,  have  the  militant  proletarians 
worked  out  in  considerable  detail  the  great  principle  of 
moral  autonomy  crudely  ejaculated  by  an  occasional 
primitive  warrior-king,  lyrically  or  meditatively  hinted 
at  by  a  larger  number  of  still  isolated  humanists  of  the 
nineteenth  century,  elaborately  articulated  by  Im- 
manuel  Kant. 

But  Kant  himself,  as  we  saw  in  an  earlier  chapter, 
left  us  all  in  difficulties  by  his  dualism  of  "pure  reason" 
with  its  rigorous  category  of  causality  and  "practical 
reason"  presupposing  freedom,  a  dualism  somewhat 
more  subtle  than  Descartes',  but  still  a  dualism  of  the 
kind  which  strives  in  vain  to  shut  off  the  flow  of  life  in 
two  static  compartments,  like  a  man  trying  to  divide  a 
river  by  drawing  his  cane  through  it.  It  is  as  though 
Descartes  tried  to  divide  the  river  by  drawing  his  cane 
horizontally  from  bank  to  bank,  while  Kant,  with  a 
keener  sense  of  reality,  drew  his  cane  vertically  from 
mouth  to  source. 

Fichte  and  Hegel  tried  to  reunite  the  "pure  reason" 
and  the  "practical  reason"  into  a  stream  confluent  with 
life.  Doubtless  there  is  an  enormous  amount  of  weight 
in  both  of  these  thinkers  still  undiscovered,  even  by 

[WI] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

their  most  devoted  commentators.  But  their  followers 
are  embarrassed  by  each  new  democratic  achievement, 
they  quarrel  remotely  and  politely  as  to  whether  Hegel- 
ianism  leads  to  Kaiserism,  and  altogether  they  remain 
aloof.  But  Karl  Marx,  in  following  the  naturalistic 
"left  wing"  of  the  Hegelian  movement,  partly  because 
of  this  influence  and  partly  in  spite  of  it,  came  closer 
to  a  large  understanding  of  the  terrible  processes  of 
modern  society  in  the  darkest  days  of  its  Industrial 
Revolution,  and  left  forecasts  of  the  processes  of  our 
own  moment  that  lend  themselves  readily  to  our  play- 
ing a  coherent  part  in  the  turmoil  of  our  day. 

Marx  allowed  the  members  of  the  "right  wing"  to 
contemplate  the  absolute  reasonableness  of  the  World 
Spirit  of  which  Hegel  told  them  they  were  all  a  part, 
and  limited  himself  to  "mother  earth,"  plus  a  myth- 
ological force  which  he  vaguely  termed  materialistic, 
but  of  which  he  made  much  more  healthy  use  than  did 
his  rivals  of  their  elusively  harmonious  Absolute. 
Marx  found  that  this  materialistic  force  exerted  itself 
through  the  "tool  of  production"  to  mould  social  rela- 
tions, the  state,  morals,  religion  and  all  our  most  cher- 
ished values.  If  the  tool  of  production  is  a  flint  axe, 
men  live  in  a  more  scattered  way  and  probably  moral- 
ize somewhat  tenuously  about  "the  sanctity  of  private 
property."  But  if  the  tool  of  production  is  a  steam 
driven  factory  owned  by  a  capitalist  and  operated  by 

[  102  ] 


LIBERTY 

our  army  of  propertyless  proletarians,  both  the  em- 
ployer who  wishes  to  keep  his  investments,  and  the  em- 
ployees who  feel  helpless  after  they  have  sold  out  their 
bodies  for  wages,  become  so  awed  in  the  presence  of 
this  dead  property  that  they  elevate  it  to  an  importance 
far  greater  than  that  of  human  life.  Little  room  for 
liberty  or  freedom  here!  Yet  Marx  foresaw  that  these 
processes  were  rending  bourgeois  society  because, 
though  the  means  of  production  were  becoming  social- 
ized, the  control  remained  with  the  great  investor- 
anarchists.  Some  day  a  realization  of  this  paradox 
would  be  driven  into  the  skulls  of  the  proletarians  long 
disciplined  to  work  co-operatively  to  the  rhythm  of 
the  machine.  Then  they  would  say:  "Why  this 
inconsistency,  why  not  socialization  of  the  control 
as  well  as  of  the  means  of  production?  Why  this  excres- 
cent game  of  competition  for  the  pleasure  of  a  few  on 
the  surface  of  a  great  movement  which  otherwise  would 
know  far  less  discord?"  Thus  would  come  the  prole- 
tarian revolution.  How  fast?  How  slow?  Here, 
there,  or  everywhere  at  once?  Marx  was  too  flexible 
and  cosmopolitan  to  suggest  more  than  tentative  hypo- 
theses, generally  very  shrewd  and  helpful  ones,  which 
he  was  always  ready  to  vary  in  the  face  of  new  realities. 
People  have  noted  that  he  made  too  much  of  the 
influence  of  the  tool  on  man,  too  little  of  the  influence  of 
man  the  inventor  or  elaborator  on  the  tool.  But  he  did 

,  [  103  ] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

well  at  the  climax  of  the  Industrial  Revolution  to  em- 
phasize the  mechanistic  drive.  He  knew  that  men 
would  never  make  this  mechanistic  drive  less  horrible 
until  they  learned  in  all  humility  to  understand  it.  He 
knew  that  sentimental  phantasies  would  never  heal  the 
world  malady.  He  asked  us  to  face  reality.  He  antici- 
pated Freud.  The  implication  of  his  philosophy  is  that 
through  non-resistance  to  laws  far  deeper  than  our 
fancies,  through  this  alone  comes  freedom. 

For  the  more  a  man  understands  the  more  does  his 
inner  feeling  of  freedom  grow.  And  we  must  supple- 
ment Marx's  mighty  work  by  an  investigation  of  the 
inner  feelings  of  the  individual  to  round  out  his  in- 
vestigation of  the  external  circumstances  of  life.  If  we 
do  this  with  a  sense  of  that  biological  evolution  which 
Darwin  was  investigating  while  Marx  carried  on  his 
work,  we  will  break  down  the  old  dualism  of  the  "pure" 
and  "practical"  reason.  We  will  realize  that  in  the 
flow  of  thought  man  feels  driven  at  the  beginning  and 
feels  free  at  the  diapason.  We  will  realize  that  (in  re- 
ligion, philosophy,  science,  and  art  alike)  accurate 
thinking  is  impossible,  unless  we  recognize  that  ever 
changing  dimuendo  and  crescendo  of  the  sense  of  free- 
dom, and  allow  for  it  exactly  as  a  physicist  allows  in  an 
experiment  for  a  play  of  energy  which  he  does  not 
understand,  but  knows  to  be  present  and  fraught  with 
momentous  consequences  for  him.  This  doctrine  of 

[  104] 


LIBERTY 

the  dimuendo  and  crescendo  of  the  sense  of  freedom 
and  its  bearing  on  the  proletarian  revolution  we  will 
now  sketch. 

It  will  be  hardly  necessary  to  remind  the  reader  that 
it  is  only  the  radical  minority  of  workers  (though  a 
minority  scattered  about  all  parts  of  western  civiliza- 
tion) that  has  articulated  clearly  the  great  critical 
principle  of  moral  autonomy  (though  all  of  them  feel 
it)  and  its  economic  and  political  corollaries,  abolition 
of  the  wage  system  and  the  formation  of  a  new  and 
more  scientific  federalism.  But  we  may  readily  observe 
that  the  minority  of  proletarians  with  critical  insight  is 
distinctly  larger  and  more  active  than  the  minority  of 
"cultured"  men  with  critical  insight.  Great  critics, 
in  every  walk  of  life,  are  much  more  rare  than  great 
poets  and  great  business-men.  We  can  better  see  the 
reason  for  this  and  we  can  better  understand  the 
deeper  impulses  and  inner  conflicts  of  proletarianism, 
if  we  correlate  here  William  McDougall's  description 
of  self-consciousness  and  the  levels  of  conduct.  Let  us 
paraphrase  and  exemplify  McDougall's  theory  with  an 
account  of  the  typical  evolution  of  an  unskilled  migra- 
tory worker  of  the  Pacific  states.  The  migratory 
worker  is  shamefully  neglected  by  our  society  until  des- 
peration goads  him  to  some  perfectly  natural  act  of  vio- 
lence, whereupon  he  is  execrated  and  cast  into  a  filthy 
jail  with  little  or  no  chance  of  a  fair  trial.  McDougall 

[105] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

chooses  as  an  example  of  the  "first  level  of  conduct"  a 
child  moved  entirely  by  the  hunger-impulse,  using 
various  devices  to  get  food  beyond  his  reach  by  a  trial 
and  error  method,  the  success  of  which  is  confirmed  by 
pleasure,  the  failure  by  pain.  Now  even  cultivated 
adults  are  as  children  in  the  presence  of  many  new 
situations.  And  McDougall's  psychological  analysis 
here  is  hardly  too  simple  for  our  adult  migratory 
laborer  under  some  circumstances.  Some  migratory 
laborers,  indeed,  are  psychopaths  and  are  almost 
literally  children  as  far  as  will-control  in  a  crisis  is  con- 
cerned. But  McDougall's  analysis  of  the  mind  on  the 
first  level  is  hardly  too  simple  for  many  a  strong-willed 
migratory  laborer  with  impulses  brutally  starved  by 
his  shifting  environment.  Suppose,  however,  our  mi- 
gratory worker  remembers  that  if  he  seizes  certain 
much-needed  food  he  will  be  arrested.  A  conflict  of 
fear  and  hunger  shakes  him.  Here,  according  to  Mc- 
Dougall,  we  have  a  second  level  of  conduct  wherein 
the  instincts  are  modified,  not  merely  by  pleasure  and 
pain,  but  by  "the  influence  of  rewards  and  punishments 
administered  more  or  less  systematically  by  the  social 
environment."  This,  of  course,  is  the  level  at  which 
most  of  us,  rich  or  poor,  educated  or  uneducated,  re- 
main most  of  the  time.  We  should  all  do  well  to  be 
cautious  of  patronizing  our  hypothetical  migratory 
worker  here.  Suppose  now  that  at  this  stage  a  delegate 

[106] 


LIBERTY 

of  the  Industrial  Workers  of  the  World  comes  along 
and  preaches  to  our  migratory  worker  and  his  associates 
the  doctrine  of  the  abolition  of  the  wage-system.  Our 
migratory  worker  may  be  too  abject  to  appreciate  the 
deeper  implications  of  such  an  hypothesis,  but  he  may 
appreciate  a  recommended  tactic:  "Sabotage"  in  the 
crudest  sense  of  the  term,  covert  violence  (like  the  burn- 
ing of  crops)  to  terrify  the  employer  into  more  humane 
treatment.  "Sabotage"  would  also  be  for  our  worker  an 
eccentric  release  of  his  abnormally  repressed  instinct  of 
self-assertion,  his  perfectly  human  longing  for  a  sense  of 
dignity.  Barbarous  as  his  conduct  may  be  he  has  pene- 
trated to  McDougall's  third  level  of  conduct  where  his 
actions  "are  controlled  in  the  main  by  the  anticipation 
of  social  praise  and  blame,"  the  praise  and  blame  of 
the  only  society  that  seems  to  have  the  slightest  kinship 
with  him  and  the  slightest  regard  for  justice,  his  squalid 
fellow-workers  and  the  rhapsodical  agitator.  He  may 
be  apprehended  and  sent  to  jail.  If  he  doesn't  die  there 
of  tuberculosis  he  may  emerge  more  abject  and  desper- 
ate than  ever  (especially  if  he  is  somewhat  feeble- 
minded), unable  to  learn  from  experience,  hopelessly 
thrown  back  to  the  first  and  second  levels  of  conduct. 
Or  (if  he  is,  as  the  majority  of  migratory  workers  are, 
a  fairly  normal  man)  his  conversation  with  people  in 
jail  and  in  court  may  help  him  to  refine  somewhat  his 
hypothesis  and  his  tactic  into  more  subtle  forms  of  vio- 

[107] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

lence  or  to  give  his  life  to  preaching  the  gospel  of  the 
Industrial  Workers  of  the  World  even  to  the  point  of 
seeking  no  longer  to  better  himself  in  any  emphatic  or 
persistent  way.  But  here  he  would  be  arriving  within 
sight  of  McDougall's  fourth  level,  the  "highest  stage, 
in  which  conduct  is  regulated  by  an  ideal  .  .  .  that 
enables  a  man  to  act  in  the  way  that  seems  to  him  right 
regardless  of  the  praise  or  blame  of  his  immediate 
social  environment,"  a  level  to  which,  according  to 
McDougall,  few  attain,  or  to  which,  we  might  more 
accurately  say,  none  of  us  attain  very  often  for  very 
long,  though  perhaps  a  considerable  number  if  not  all 
of  us  attain  to  it  for  fleeting  moments  and  a  very  few 
gradually  discipline  themselves  into  sustaining  it  as  a 
fairly  unbroken  essence  of  their  lives. 

Just  here  some  hasty  sceptic  may  ask  whether  we  are 
plotting  sentimentally  to  put  our  hypothetical  I.  W.  W. 
on  a  level  with  Marcus  Aurelius  or  with  Socrates  in 
the  great  moments  when  he  repudiated  the  offer  of 
Crito.  In  a  certain  sense,  of  course  not — in  a  certain 
sense,  of  course.  It  is  at  least  arguable  whether,  given  a 
tolerable  heredity  for  our  Industrial  Worker  and  as- 
suming him  to  be  as  able  as  so  many  of  his  fraternity 
really  are,  Socrates  and  Marcus  Aurelius  would,  in  the 
same  environment,  acquit  themselves  any  better.  But 
to  follow  such  a  speculative  gyration  would  be  futile. 
Obviously  our  I.  W.  W.,  even  if  he  is  at  the  highest 

[108] 


LIBERTY 

level  of  conduct,  is  not  demonstrating  beyond  cavil  a 
mentality  equal  to  that  of  Socrates  and  Marcus 
Aurelius.  But  he  has,  after  a  fashion,  reached  the 
fourth  level.  He  is  certainly  above  custom,  taboo,  ser- 
vility to  public  opinion;  he  is  certainly  a  stoic  acting 
on  principle;  and  that  he  can  reason  with  agility  and 
vigor  and  startling  freedom  from  sophistry  about  these 
principles  can  be  demonstrated  to  any  open-minded 
man  who  has  sufficient  initiative  to  seek  out  and  to 
engage  in  controversy  with  him  or  any  of  his  type. 
We  must  renew  our  emphasis  of  a  point  with  which 
we  do  not  think  McDougall  would  disagree,  and  which 
has  been  implied  all  the  time  in  our  examination  of 
the  relations  of  religion,  criticism,  science,  and  art — 
we  must  not  make  our  evolutionary  psychology  uni- 
linear any  more  than  the  contemporary  ethnologist 
dares  make  his  account  of  the  development  of  societies 
unilinear.  As  with  the  life  of  a  society,  an  individual's 
mental  life  is  not  to  be  measured  off  with  finality  in 
four  periods  or  less  through  which  he  passes  once  and 
for  all,  and  through  which  all  individuals  pass  in 
almost  mechanical  recapitulation.  Man's  moral  life 
probably  begins  at  the  first  level  of  conduct  with  every 
new  situation  with  which  he  is  confronted,  provided 
that  the  situation  is  sufficiently  complex  to  evoke  a  di- 
lemma. Perhaps,  as  McDougall  suggests,  only  a  few 
men  ever  reach  the  fourth  level  in  any  situation,  or  per- 

[109] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

haps  we  may  say  that  many  men  attain  to  it  now  and 
then,  but  attain  to  it  for  a  very  brief  space — those  who 
are  not  of  the  very  small  minority  of  Titans.  However 
that  may  be,  it  would  certainly  seem  that  as  life  goes 
on,  the  levels  of  conduct  in  all  men  become  more  and 
more  complicated.  Even  the  pleasure-pain  stage  is 
marked  with  more  subtle  pleasures  and  pains.  And  the 
fourth  stage,  the  stage  of  devotion  to  principles,  for 
those  who  reach  it,  lose  it  and  regain  it  is  always  be- 
coming a  stage  of  devotion  to  principles  more  and 
more  subtly  criticised  by  their  practitioners  themselves, 
more  and  more  delicately  and  strongly  modified.  It  is 
roughly  true,  no  doubt,  that  a  man's  life  can  be  meas- 
ured off  in  two,  three  or  four  of  these  levels  if  we  make 
a  very  simple  and  summary  biography  of  him.  But 
is  it  not  also  true,  and  more  significantly  true,  that  he 
is  to  be  seen,  on  closer  scrutiny,  passing  through  these 
levels  over  and  over  again,  but  in  the  proverbial  spiral? 
So  our  redoubtable  migratory  worker  may  have  at- 
tained to  a  fourth  level  of  conduct,  even  if  not  to  a 
fourth  level,  signalized  by  the  spacious  perspectives 
which  Socrates  and  Marcus  Aurelius  knew.  Yet  in  all 
three  men  there  is  that  beautiful  harmony  of  humility 
and  pride  which  McDougall  calls  the  self-regarding 
sentiment:  they  are  too  proud  to  care  for  the  passing 
praise  and  blame  of  sleek  Laodiceans;  they  are  at  the 
same  time  humble  as  they  contemplate  their  several 

[HO] 


LIBERTY 

ideals,  whether  the  perpetuation  of  justice,  the  glorifi- 
cation of  serenity,  or  the  furtherance  of  the  reconstruct- 
ive mission  of  the  proletariat.  All  three  men  are  above 
the  slave-morality  of  the  "normal"  majority  in  its  pre- 
vailing mood,  which  is  founded  not  on  the  self-regard- 
ing sentiment,  but  on  fear-repressions  of  impulses 
which  ought  to  be  reconciled  with  others,  redirected, 
sublimated.  In  all  our  three  sturdier  men  freedom  has 
emerged  more  and  more  clearly.  The  old  naive  debate 
between  determinists  and  indeterminists,  theological  or 
economic,  would  not  interest  them.  They  feel  free,  be- 
cause they  have  learned  so  much  self-control,  to  devote 
themselves  (by  the  very  recognition  of  obstacles  both 
inside  and  outside  the  mind)  to  their  great  purposes. 
They  are,  in  other  words,  direct  actionists.  And  they 
feel  that  no  obstacles,  however  retarding,  not  death  it- 
self, obstruct  permanently  the  fulfillment  of  the  great 
purposes  for  which  they  stand  ready  to  give  their  lives. 
They  feel  their  own  personalities  devoted  as  at  least 
partially  harmonized  wholes  to  these  great  rational 
purposes.  They  feel  that  they  have  strengthened 
through  reconciliations  and  redirections  their  own 
weaker  lineaments  of  character,  their  own  paralyzing 
inner  conflicts.  They  are  capable  of  huge  concentra- 
tion and  of  sustained,  temperate  enthusiasm.  Their 
emotions  do  not  belie,  but  they  energize  their  reason- 
ings. They  know  not  the  substance  of  the  universe  as 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

a  whole  nor  do  they  know  all  the  processes  therein,  nor 
whether  these  be  orderly  or  capricious  or  determined 
by  mechanism  or  determined  by  a  Logos,  but  they  feel 
a  sense  of  co-operation  with  beneficent  allies,  and  they 
feel  free  because  they  know  a  good  deal  of  themselves 
and  a  good  deal  about  their  fellows.  In  each  of  them 
"the  self  comes  to  rule  supreme  over  conduct,"  so  Mc- 
Dougall  has  it,  "the  individual  is  raised  above  moral 
conflict,  he  attains  character  in  the  fullest  sense  and  a 
completely  generalized  will,  and  exhibits  to  the  world 
that  finest  flower  of  moral  growth,  serenity.  His  strug- 
gles are  no  longer  moral  conflicts,  but  are  intellectual 
efforts  to  discover  what  is  most  worth  doing,  what  is 
most  right  for  him  to  do."  Each  one  is  "dowered  with 
the  hate  of  hate,  the  scorn  of  scorn,  the  love  of  love." 
John  Dewey  finds  that  "each  instance"  of  reflection 
"reveals,  more  or  less  clearly,  five  distinct  steps:  (i)  a 
felt  difficulty;  (2)  its  location  and  definition;  (3)  sug- 
gestion of  possible  solution;  (4)  development  by  rea- 
soning of  the  bearings  of  the  suggestion;  (5)  further 
observation  and  experiment  leading  to  its  acceptance 
or  rejection;  that  is,  the  conclusion  of  belief  or  dis- 
belief." We  may  elaborate  these  steps  in  our  way  and 
attempt  a  correlation  of  them  with  McDougall's  sug- 
gestive exposition  of  the  "levels  of  conduct"  applicable 
to  our  investigation  of  the  spiritual  promise  of  the 
proletariat. 

[112] 


LIBERTY 

Let  us  think  first  of  a  young  workman  aglow  with 
the  obsolescent,  individualistic  American  religious 
faith  that  in  our  country  "there  is  always  room  at  the 
top."  He  struggles  ambitiously.  He  marries  and  his 
wife  struggles  hopefully  with  him.  Children  come. 
His  nominal  wages  go  up  slowly,  but  the  cost  of  living 
goes  up  more  rapidly.  His  wife  undertakes  work  out- 
side the  home  at  the  first  moment  possible.  Their  ag- 
gregate income  barely  meets  the  subsistence  level  with 
practically  no  allowance  for  recreation.  Indeed, 
worthy  and  industrious  as  they  are,  they  find  themselves 
losing  in  vitality  each  year,  with  no  compensatory  gain, 
no  provision  for  old  age  or  accident  possible,  and  not 
the  slightest  opportunity  of  making  a  really  construct- 
ive change.  This  situation  is  as  common  as  the  leaves 
of  the  trees.  If  you  doubt  it,  read  the  authoritative  gov- 
ernmental Report  of  the  Commission  for  Industrial  Re- 
lations, edition  Manly,  Washington,  D.  C.,  1916.  What 
Dewey  calls  a  "felt  difficulty"  disturbs  the  religious 
faith  of  our  sturdy  worker,  now  no  longer  young  except 
in  years.  Thought  begins.  He  may  brush  it  aside  in 
apathy.  Or  some  chance  speech  or  the  sight  of  some 
horror  may  shock  him  into  a  sense  of  perspective  that 
will  prolong  or  renew  the  thought.  Or  we  may  behold  a 
more  advanced  cycle  of  thought  in  a  more  sophisti- 
cated and  rebellious  young  workman,  of  type  so  rapidly 
on  the  increase  despite  the  inflated  wages  of  the  mo- 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

ment,  or  more  likely  because  of  them  (in  the  few  trades 
where  they  have  really  increased).  This  workman  is 
full  of  vague  but  exalted  religious  faith  in  the  destiny 
of  the  advancing  proletariat  like  that  which  we  have  al- 
ready described.  This  is,  of  course,  a  far  healthier  be- 
ginning, a  promise  of  a  much  more  rational  develop- 
ment than  that  imputed  to  our  first  hypothetical  work- 
man. Our  second  laborer,  then,  agitates  among  his 
comrades.  Let  us  suppose  that,  as  often  happens,  they 
remain  apathetic  in  status  quo,  be  it  smug  craft-union- 
ism or  timorous,  unenlightened  non-unionism.  A 
l'felt  difficulty"  arises  in  the  mind  of  our  second 
proletarian.  Thought  begins.  As  with  a  pain 
in  the  body,  he  "locates,"  he  "defines"  this  difficulty. 
Just  here  most  people,  proletarian  and  bourgeois  alike, 
trump  up  a  pseudo-definition  as  hastily  as  possible 
and  hurry  on  to  a  patent-medicine  solution  in  order  to 
get  over  as  painlessly  as  possible  the  strenuous  job  of 
thinking — till  the  pain  returns  with  redoubled  force 
and  more  deeply  organic  deadliness.  In  psychoanalyti- 
cal terms:  most  people  drug  their  pains  with  phan- 
tasies and  purposive  "forgetting"  or  repression,  but  our 
workman,  being  more  creative  than  the  possessive  bour- 
geois, being  more  natively  free,  being  a  sort  of  psycho- 
analyst in  the  rough,  faces  the  reality  inside  his  mind 
and  the  reality  outside  his  mind.  Let  us  suppose  that 
our  first  young  workman,  with  his  faith  in  laissez-faire 


LIBERTY 

individualism  destroyed,  has  hurried  roughly  through 
a  thought-system  which  has  culminated  in  the  more 
sophisticated  and  sounder  faith  in  the  destiny  of  the 
proletariat.  Like  the  second  workman  he  becomes  an 
agitator,  but  like  the  second  workman  he  is  momentar- 
ily overwhelmed  by  the  apathy  of  his  associates.  A 
"felt  difficulty"  arises.  With  him  a  second  cycle  of 
thought  begins  after  his  hypothesis,  in  its  more  naive 
form,  fails  of  verification.  He  "locates"  or  "defines" 
the  "difficulty,"  the  need  of  a  more  convincing,  a  more 
scientific  formula,  a  more  comprehensive  working 
hypothesis  that  will  better  endure  the  logical  scrutiny 
of  criticism  and  will  prove  verifiable  in  contact  with 
the  chaos  of  facts  which  it  must  in  part  at  least  reduce 
to  cosmos  by  rational  and  widely  observant  control. 
He  has  grasped  already  the  working  hypothesis  of 
direct  action  or  the  moral  autonomy  of  the  individual 
proletarian  and  of  proletarians  as  a  group.  Now  he 
seeks  to  develop  this  by  reason  and  by  further  observa- 
tion. He  talks  with  other  restless  workers.  He  com- 
prehends more  or  less  vaguely  the  fact  and  the  implica- 
tions of  "surplus  value."  He  chances  across  one  or 
more  of  the  innumerable  five  and  ten-cent  pamphlets 
that  furnish  simple  sketches  of  Marxism.  He  reads  the 
Communist  Manifesto.  If  he  is  a  strenuous  reader 
he  may  even  struggle  through  Capital.  Men  have  been 
known  who  have  worked  all  day  at  the  most  grinding 

["S3  ' 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

toil  and  spent  half  the  night  reading  Capital,  yes,  they 
have  been  known  to  spend  half  the  night  reading  and 
rereading  determinedly  a  single  one  of  its  compact 
pages.  At  all  events  our  worker  reads  or  talks  super- 
ficially or  profoundly  until  he  arrives  at  the  corollary 
of  direct  action,  the  abolition  of  the  wage-system,  and 
until  he  has  learned,  perhaps  from  a  pamphlet  by 
Daniel  DeLeon,  the  large  democratic  scheme  of  in- 
dustrial unionism.  Here  he  has  advanced  well  into  the 
third  and  fourth  stages  of  thought,  the  suggestion  of  a 
possible  solution  and  the  reasoning  about  it.  He  has 
made  some  inductions  from  observations  more  or  less 
multifarious  and  he  has  passed  into  the  deductive  aspect 
of  criticism  as  well.  He  has  subdued  his  hopes  and 
fears  without  destroying  them.  His  new  religious  faith 
in  the  destiny  of  the  proletariat  is  stronger  than  ever, 
just  because  of  his  bracing  passage  through  a  pessi- 
mistic Valley  of  the  Shadow  of  Death.  He  has,  indeed, 
been  brave  enough,  or  perhaps  despairing  enough  to 
take  a  much  more  sweeping  view  of  the  evils  of  life 
than  at  the  outset  when  he  clung  to  the  outdated,  naive 
faith  of  the  eighteenth  and  nineteenth  century  Ameri- 
can frontiersmen.  He  can  now  look  often  beyond  his 
immediate  and  more  direct  interests,  another  dollar  a 
day,  a  better  habitation.  Although  he  cannot  and 
should  not  forget  these  terribly  importunate  needs  he 
may  realize  that  he  has  to  look  beyond  them  to  attain 

[116] 


LIBERTY 

them,  that  in  the  general  betterment  of  his  fellows  lies 
the  only  sound  possibility  of  his  own  betterment,  or  he 
may  attain  to  the  sublime  stoical  attitude  that  even 
though  he  may  never  enter  the  promised  land  the  only 
joy  in  life  that  will  seldom  fail  to  exalt  him  is  an  un- 
ceasing devotion  in  order  that  other  proletarians  whom 
he  may  never  see  may  some  time  consummate  the  as- 
sault and  plant  their  banners  on  the  wall.  The  num- 
ber of  such  stoics  in  overalls  is  growing  much  more 
rapidly  today  than  the  number  of  "gentleman"  stoics 
among  those  who  study  luxuriously  the  history  of 
philosophy  under  university  elms.  Our  worker,  too,  is 
indulging  in  "original  research"  just  as  significantly  as 
some  bio-chemist  who,  in  a  richly  endowed  laboratory, 
is  scrutinizing  the  mysteries  of  protoplasm  and  the 
meaning  of  life  or  some  symbolic  logician  who  has 
evolved  a  new  theorem  as  yet  wholly  untainted  by 
utility.  Our  worker,  like  the  bio-chemist  and  the  sym- 
bolic logician,  cannot,  of  course,  be  sure  that  he  is  right. 
All  thought  is  dangerous.  Life  is  full  of  risk.  God 
Himself,  said  James,  is  "in  trouble."  But  repeated 
failures  do  not  crush  all  workers.  And  our  hero  feels 
that  his  opinions  are  coming  to  be  more  and  more 
worthy  of  being  dignified  as  knowledge.  At  all  events 
he  has  ceased  to  be  a  mere  observer.  He  is  non-resist- 
ant, for  he  has  given  up  all  fantastic  attempts  to  ration- 
alize away  the  reality  of  poverty  and  injustice.  His 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

freedom  has  begun  to  emerge  in  a  crescendo,  which  be- 
gins with  the  second  stage  of  all  thought,  becomes  in- 
tensified with  the  third,  and  will  press  through  the  vari- 
ous fluctuations  of  the  fourth  and  fifth  stages  to  a  climax 
wherewith  comes  a  proved  sense  of  control.  The  length 
of  time  and  the  precision  with  which  our  worker  wills 
to  dwell  on  his  hypothetical  induction  and  his  deductive 
review  of  it  (his  "elaboration  of  the  tentative  hypo- 
thesis to  make  it  more  clear  and  consistent  because 
squaring  with  a  wider  range  of  facts") ,  the  patience  and 
courage  with  which  he  proceeds  with  his  experimental 
efforts  to  control,  to  verify,  this  length  of  time  differ- 
entiates him  as  thinker  from  his  more  apathetic  fellows, 
who  muddle  along  in  a  trial  and  and  error  process,  now 
dully  hopeless,  now  vacantly  exalted.  Neither  our 
worker  nor  any  other  men,  however  godlike,  ever  "get 
wholly  beyond  the  trial  and  error  situation.  Our  most 
elaborate  and  radically  consistent  thought  has  to  be 
tried  in  the  world,  and  thereby  tried  out.  And  since 
it  can  never  take  into  account  all  the  connections,  it 
can  never  cover  with  perfect  accuracy  all  the  conse- 
quences. Yet  a  thoughtful  survey  of  conditions  is  so 
careful,  and  the  guessing  at  results  so  controlled  that 
we  have  a  right  to  mark  off  the  reflective  experience 
from  the  grosser  trial  and  error  forms  of  action," 

In  England  today  a  vast  army  of  workers,  organized 
as  laborers  have  never  been  organized  before,  has  ap- 

[118] 


LIBERTY 

preached  the  felt  difficulty  and  said,  in  sentences  of 
such  stylistic  majesty  and  intellectual  massiveness  that 
they  overawe  the  "cultured"  conservatives:  "The  in- 
dividualist system  of  capitalist  production,  based  on  the 
private  ownership  and  competitive  administration  of 
land  and  capital,  with  its  reckless  'profiteering'  and 
wage  slavery;  with  its  glorification  of  the  unhampered 
struggle  for  the  means  of  life  and  its  hypocritical  pre- 
tense of  the  'survival  of  the  fittest,'  with  the  monstrous 
inequality  of  circumstances  which  it  produces  and  the 
degradation  and  brutalization,  both  moral  and  spirit- 
ual, resulting  therefrom,  may,  we  hope  (partly  through 
the  agency  of  the  European  war  and  partly  through 
labor's  reconstructive  forecasts  and  efforts),  indeed, 
have  received  a  death  blow."  And  the  British  prole- 
tariat has  passed  from  this,  the  second  stage  of  thought, 
to  the  third  and  fourth  hypothesis-making  and  de- 
ductive purification — in  which  it  clears  the  confusion  of 
laws  and  customs  and  superstitions  that  bemuse  our 
reactionaries.  This  proletarian  army  knows,  as  John 
Dewey  knows,  that  a  "law"  is  a  hypothesis,  even  after 
much  deductive  purification  and  even  after  rigorous 
"verification,"  an  hypothesis  and  not  the  eternality  that 
superstition  holds  it  to  be.  British  labor,  therefore, 
concludes  defiantly,  in  the  face  of  trial  and  error  s.tates- 
men:  "If  law  is  the  mother  of  freedom,  science,  to  the 
Labor  Party,  must  be  the  parent  of  law."  Labor  is 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

learning  the  "love  of  love"  and  the  "hate  of  hate,"  to 
love  all  men  and  to  hate  only  the  bad  qualities  and  the 
evil  systems  which  men  indulge  and  make  when  they 
have  not  thought  rigorously  enough. 

British  labor  stands  on  tiptoe  to  enter  into  the  fifth 
stage  of  verification  exultantly.  Its  leaders  are  not  say- 
ing anything  at  all  new  to  those  who  have  followed  the 
radical  thought  of  the  last  twenty-five  years.  But  they 
are  saying  it  with  a  tact  and  force  that  makes  it  possible 
to  discuss  matters  which  the  "cultured"  people  once 
thought  fanatical  or  Utopian,  in  circles  which  are  posi- 
tively respectable.  But  the  really  important  thing  about 
this  review  of  salient  radical  principles  is  its  tone.  Per- 
haps the  British  Labor  leaders  in  Parliament  have  been 
aroused  from  their  lethargic  compromises  by  the  un- 
rest of  their  rank  and  file,  which  has  increased  so 
rapidly  since  1910.  At  all  events  they  now  adopt  a 
militant  accent  and  say  in  effect  to  the  rulers:  if  you 
do  not  carry  on  your  work  well  we  will  assume  all  re- 
sponsibility and  carry  it  on  better  than  you  dare  dream. 
This  is  a  subtle  change.  Instead  of  the  old  compromise 
and  vague  protest  it  accepts  the  very  principles  which 
its  conservative  enemies  profess  and  it  guarantees  to 
live  up  to  them  better  than  those  who  have  been  mouth- 
ing them.  It  has  found  freedom  through  non-resist- 
ance. Moreover,  British  Labor  now  explicitly  recog- 
nizes the  kinship  of  work  with  the  hand  and  work  with 

[  120] 


LIBERTY 

the  brain,  and  thus  smashes  that  old  corrupting  dualism 
upon  which  the  prophets  from  John  Ruskin  to  John 
Dewey,  from  William  Morris  to  Leo  Tolstoy  have 
warred  with  their  frequent  insistence  on  the  con- 
tinuity of  theory  and  practice.  British  Labor  would 
say,  like  James  and  Royce,  that  "an  idea  is  a  plan  of 
action."  It  will,  then,  practice  what  the  government 
merely  preaches.  It  will  not  oppose;  it  threatens  to  do 
the  thing  better  itself.  In  other  words,  it  has  become 
scientific  and  critical;  it  will  not  be  cynically  fatalistic 
about  the  facts,  nor  will  it  try  to  sentimentalize  them 
out  of  existence;  it  will  recognize  them  and  it  will 
remember  that  "everything  ideal  has  a  natural  origin 
and  an  ideal  development."  Its  program,  beginning 
with  the  mild  demand  for  the  universal  minimum"  and 
ending  writh  the  clarion  call  demanding  "the  surplus  for 
the  common  good,"  is  a  recapitulation  of  labor's  own 
moral  evolution.  It  has  come  to  elaborate  and  purify 
and  largely  accept  the  "scientific  socialism"  which 
Marx  outlined  so  hugely  as  he  took  a  wide  survey  of 
the  oceanic  trial  and  error  of  the  German,  French  and 
English  proletariat.  British  Labor  is  conferring  lib- 
erty upon  itself  through  a  non-resisting  recognition  of 
realities  leading  to  a  crescendo  of  freedom,  a  sense  of 
control,  of  moral  autonomy. 


[121] 


VII 
THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

We  have  already  had  occasions  to  dwell  on  the  de- 
terrent influences  of  the  natural  sciences  on  the  younger 
sciences  of  human  nature,  particularly  on  economics, 
psychology,  and  history.  Mathematical  instruments, 
methods  of  measurement  which  have  carried  us  far  in 
the  control  of  forces  which  at  first  seemed  remote  from 
the  comprehension  of  men,  these  methods  so  extraordi- 
narily successful  with  natural  phenomena  have  done 
extraordinarily  little  to  illuminate  the  secrets  within 
our  own  hearts  or  to  harmonize  our  relations  with  our 
friends  and  enemies  at  the  next  door.  Economics  went 
blind  astray  measuring  distribution  with  little  thought 
of  consumption.  History  chopped  up  human  life  into 
useless  conceptual  atoms  or  molecules  called  events. 
And  psychology  has  tended  towards  a  similar  pseudo- 
chemical  or  pseudo-physical  analysis  of  the  mind  into 
faculties  or  some  sort  of  compartments  or  some  sort  of 
mental  electrons  that  are  neither  demonstrable  facts 
nor  fruitful  concepts.  In  all  three  of  these  sciences, 
also,  a  very  naive  overestimation  of  the  validity  of  sta- 
tistics has  palsied  our  groping  minds. 

[122] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

But  now  we  are  beginning  to  evolve  a  method  in 
psychology  which  is  really  scientific,  not  a  pseudo- 
scientific  imitation  of  details  of  method  that  have 
proved  valid  in  physics,  chemistry,  and  astronomy,  but 
which  cannot  thus  be  certified  for  the  peculiar  phenom- 
ena of  psychology.  In  dealing  with  the  "stream  of  con- 
sciousness" we  did  wrong  to  try  to  isolate  a  mental  atom. 
But  psychopathology  has  given  us  a  clue  to  the  real 
psychological  equivalent  of  the  isolation  of  the  atom  in 
chemistry.  There  is,  we  learn,  no  difference  except  in 
degree  between  the  sane  and  the  insane.  In  these  tur- 
bulent days  we  can  hardly  dare  to  question  this  gen- 
eralization of  the  psychopathologists.  But  in  the  in- 
sane certain  mental  reactions  stand  out  more  vividly  in 
the  general  stream  of  their  reactions  than  in  the  more 
subtly  integrated  reactions  of  the  sane.  By  studying 
these  reactions  in  the  insane,  by  studying  the  regressions 
of  the  insane  to  the  simpler  behavior  of  the  almost  for- 
gotten days  of  childhood  and  to  the  simpler  behavior  of 
primitive  ancestors  we  can  attain  all  the  benefits  of  a 
more  artificial  analysis  without  any  of  the  disastrous 
consequences  of  orthodox  general  psychology  which 
analyzes,  not  mental  behavior,  but  "mind"  or  "con- 
sciousness" treated  as  if  it  were  a  receptacle,  a  curious, 
immobile  phantasm  conjured  to  stand  still  as  Joshua 
conjured  the  sun  and  Canute's  courtiers  the  waves. 
Among  all  the  psychopathologists  I  have  read  or  talked 

[123] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

with  I  know  of  none  more  sensible  and  comprehensive 
than  Doctor  Adolf  Meyer,  in  whose  words  we  may  best 
see  the  methodological  ground-work  of  the  new  psy- 
chology : 

"What  is  of  importance  to  us  is  the  activity  and  behavior  of  the 
total  organism  or  individual  as  opposed  to  the  activity  of  single  de- 
tachable organs.  It  is  more  than  cerebration;  we  must  take  our  do- 
main broadly  as  behavior  and  passive  and  constructive  adaptation  of 
the  entire  individual.  It  differs  from  the  ordinary  physiology  because 
it  represents  an  integration  of  biologic  activity  on  a  specific  level 
through  its  having  the  characteristic  of  more  or  less  consciousness  and 
because  of  its  hanging  together  by  associative  function.  From  the  point 
of  view  of  science,  behavior  and  mental  activity,  even  in  their  implicit 
or  more  subjective  forms,  are  not  more  subjective  than  the  activity  of 
the  stomach  or  the  heart  or  blood  serum  or  cerebrospinal  fluid  or  the 
knee  jerk.  Each  individual  has  his  own  mental  activity,  but  to  say  that 
we  cannot  see  it  and  make  it  accessible  and  understand  it  in  others  is  a 
philosopher's  scare  like  the  statement  that  we  can  never  know  whether 
the  world  exists,  because  we  know  only  mental  states  or  processes. 
Common  sense  has  never  worried  about  the  reality  of  the  world.  I 
hope  we  shall  soon  be  agreed  on  the  fact  that  we  need  not  worry 
about  the  psychobiologic  reality  and  the  objectivity  of  those  actions 
and  internal  workings  of  living  beings  which  we  call  mentation  and 
behavior. 

"I  urge  the  student  to  trace  the  plain  life  history  of  a  person  and  to 
record  it  on  what  I  call  the  life  chart;  the  result  is  a  record  of  a 
smooth  or  broken  life  curve  of  each  one  of  the  main  organs  and  func- 
tions, and  in  addition,  a  record  of  the  main  events  of  the  life  of  the 
whole  bundle  of  organs,  that  is,  'the  individual  as  a  whole'  and  of 

[124] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

the  facts  which  determined  and  constituted  his  behavior.  This 
realm  of  objective  and  determinable  facts  of  the  individual  as  a  per- 
son constitutes  what  we  as  physicians  need  to  know  as  psychology. 
The  science  dealing  with  these  facts  I  call  psychobiology,  in  order 
not  to  step  on  the  toes  of  the  introspectionist  who  might  want  to 
reserve  the  term  'psychology'  for  the  traditional  type  of  subjective 
psychology.  Its  facts  are  behavior  in  the  widest  sense  of  reactive  and 
constructive  adaptation  of  the  completely  integrated  organism.  We 
ask:  What  are  the  individual's  assets:  the  reactive  and  associative 
resources  in  the  form  of  effective  and  expressive  activity  and  its 
abortive  forms,  conations,  affections,  cognition,  discrimination,  and 
reconstructive  and  constructive  imagination  ?  Under  what  conditions 
are  they  apt  to  go  wrong  and  under  what  conditions  can  they  be 
modified  again  for  the  better?  You  can  readily  see  that  we  are 
dealing  with  the  absolutely  objective  and  positive  facts,  peculiar 
only  in  the  way  which  they  hang  together  by  association  in  the  wealth 
of  equivalents  and  combinations,  and  in  the  varying  extent  and  depth 
to  which  they  implicate  the  parts  of  the  integrated  organism.  So 
much  for  the  student's  general  orientation  with  its  restoration  of  the 
common  sense  attitude. 

"As  an  instance  of  the  study  of  assets,  we  take  up  the  Binet-Simon 
and  other  genetic  standards  and  survey  the  successive  epochs  of  human 
life  and  their  psychobiologic  problems :  infancy ;  then  the  period  of 
acquisition  of  signs  and  language;  the  early  childhood  passing  into 
what  Joseph  Lee  calls  the  'Big  Injun'  stage  and  the  school  childhood; 
the  preadolescent  and  adolescent  period;  the  period  of  emancipation; 
the  period  of  adult  aggressive  life;  the  period  of  maturity;  the 
matron's  period;  and  the  period  of  senescence — each  with  its  own 
psychobiologic  features  and  problems. 

"Within  this  broad  and  clearly  biologic  frame,  the  student  be- 
comes ready  to  see  a  proper  setting  for  the  more  detailed  and  specific 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

chapters,  among  which  I  take  up  first  the  cognitive-representative 
data:  reactions  to  things  present  (sensation  and  perception),  reac- 
tions to  things  absent  (memories  and  images),  reactions  with  ideas 
and  words  and  concepts  or  orientation;  all  activities  depending  more 
or  less  directly  on  the  collaboration  of  brain  and  sense-mechanism. 
Then  we  take  up  the  affective  processes  which  determine  the  general 
trend  of  association  and  involve,  beside  the  brain,  mainly  the  sym- 
pathetic system  and  internal  secretions,  as  Cannon  has  so  well  shown 
lately;  and  then  the  overt  actions,  specified  as  effective  and  expres- 
sive, and  the  laws  of  habit-formation,  memory  and  association,  and 
conation  or  will  and  its  relation  to  instinct.  We  then  consider  the 
various  degrees  of  consciousness  and  attention;  and  we  introduce  the 
data  of  hypnotism  and  the  subconscious  determining  influences  shown 
in  the  association  experiment. 

"On  this  ground,  we  take  up  the  genetic  account  of  several  leading 
functions  or  instincts  as  given  in  Pyle's  'Outlines  of  Educational 
Psychology'  and  incidentally  the  psychobiology  of  sex  life. 

"A  review  of  the  nonmental  components  of  the  mental  integra- 
tions, the  foundation  of  fatigue,  and  waking  and  sleep  states,  of  the 
share  of  the  circulation,  of  internal  secretion,  and  of  brain  organi- 
zation, rounds  off  the  course  and  leaves  us  with  a  well-checked  out- 
line of  examination  of  the  mental  resources  and  reaction  tendencies 
of  any  patient,  to  be  used  and  developed  in  the  third  and  fourth 
year  courses  in  psychopathology  and  psychiatry. 

"Psychobiology  as  thus  conceived  forms  clearly  and  simply  the 
missing  chapter  dealing  with  functions  of  the  total  person  and  not 
merely  of  detachable  parts.  It  is  a  topic  representing  a  special  level 
of  biologic  integration,  a  new  level  of  simple  units  having  in  com- 
mon the  fact  of  blending  in  consciousness,  integrating  our  organ- 
ism into  simple  or  complex  adaptive  and  constructive  reactions  of 
overt  and  implicit  behavior.  I  contrast  (i)  mentally  or  more  or 

[126] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

less  consciously  connected  reactions,  and  (2)  nonmental  reactions  of 
individual  detachable  organs  which  may  as  well  be  studied  in  the 
test  tube  and  isolated  and  then  certainly  give  us  no  evidence  of  con- 
sciousness. With  this  frank  contrast  we  avoid  panpsychism  and 
solipsism  and  absolute  subjectivism  and  all  the  other  bugbears  con- 
fusing the  medical  and  lay  mind  and  the  would-be  scientific  psy- 
chologists. 

"Science  deals  with  a  world  of  things,  facts,  and  relations  appear- 
ing in  several  distinct  levels  or  types  of  integration.  Physics  deals 
with  one  set  of  aspects  of  matter  and  ether;  chemistry  with  another, 
namely,  the  laws  of  behavior  of  atoms  and  their  affinities  and  com- 
binations; physiology  with  a  biologic  level,  that  is,  those  objects  and 
their  parts  which  grow  by  reproduction  and  metabolism;  and  as 
psychobiology  we  treat  the  functions  of  total  organisms  which  blend 
in  more  or  less  consciousness  in  a  manner  constituting  a  special  level 
of  integration  which  has  been  especially  and  most  characteristically 
enriched  by  the  interindividual  and  social  development  of  language. 
This  level  of  integration  we  treat  as  psychobiology  when  considered 
as  actual  functioning  and  behavior  of  living  organisms.  All  that 
which  constitutes  psychobiology  to  the  physician  is,  therefore,  also 
physical  as  well  as  mental.  We  can  further  recognize  an  ultra- 
biologic  level  of  facts  when  we  consider  the  products  of  such  func- 
tioning, as  logic  and  mathematics  or  theory  of  relations,  or  as  history 
and  record  of  the  human  race,  including  also  the  more  than  biologic 
realms  of  fact,  philosophy,  and  religion.  In  this  way  we  obtain  an 
orderly  perspective  of  the  various  sciences,  but  eliminate  the  contrast 
between  physical  and  mental. 

"It  is  desirable,  I  think,  to  make  the  student  feel  that  he  does  not 
have  to  draw  too  sharp  a  line  between  mentally  integrated  and  non- 
mentally  integrated  activities.  Many  reflexes  or  instincts  or  reac- 

[127] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

tions  can  appear  on  the  physiologic  level  or  on  the  psychobiologic 
level.  The  difference  lies  in  the  mode  of  hanging  together,  the  set- 
ting and  the  extent  and  kind  of  possible  interrelations. 

"On  the  physiologic  level  the  reactions  last  as  long  as  the  stimulus, 
are  commensurate  with  the  stimulus,  and  occur  as  it  were  according 
to  the  laws  and  requirements  of  contiguity. 

"The  entering  into  the  psychobiologic  level  brings  a  more  exten- 
sive scope  of  potential  links  and  interrelations  with  the  laws  of  con- 
sciousness and  of  associative  relations. 

"The  reaction  becomes  part  of  what  I  describe  to  the  student  as 
a  burst  or  geyser  of  daily  activity,  with  laws  of  blending  and  laws  of 
falling  into  trends  laid  down  according  to  the  principles  which  expe- 
rience With  this  special  level  of  biologic  regulations  must  furnish 
us.  The  student  must  realize  that  the  mechanisms  of  the  psycho- 
biologic  level  are  not  limited  to  the  type  of  consciousness  which  we 
know  in  waking  life  and  which  most  psychologists  cultivate  exclu- 
sively. .  .  .  Many  conditions  will  .  .  .  become  intelligible  only  if 
we  take  into  consideration  the  special  characteristcs  of  special  types 
of  consciousness,  such  as  dream  states,  half-dream  states,  states  of  dis- 
traction, hypnosis,  and  special  affective  states,  the  study  of  which  can 
do  full  justice  to  the  fact  that  some  of  these  special  states  will  prove 
open  to  explanation  and  reproduction  or  at  least  facilitation  by  the 
introduction  of  detachable  physiologic  lifts,  chemicals,  narcotics,  or 
internal  secretions,  of  which  we  know  that  they  can  produce  modifi- 
cations of  the  hanging  together  of  psychobiologic  trends. 


"The  difference  between  modern  psychology  and  the  older  form  is 
that  we  can  no  longer  be  satisfied  with  mere  plausible  statements  and 
amplifications  of  the  obvious,  but  must  test  and  verify  objective  facts 
under  controlled  conditions  and  controlled  modifications." 

[128] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

How  would  the  theories  with  which  we  endeavor  to 
rationalize  the  economic  behavior  of  men  endure 
scrutiny  with  such  a  psychological  method  as  this? 
Orthodox  economic,  both  the  foggy  and  timorous  ver- 
sion of  the  universities  and  its  blustering  travesty  in 
the  market  place,  could  not  endure  such  a  scrutiny  for 
a  moment.  And  at  first  glance  Marxian  economics,  too, 
seems  to  rest  so  completely,  with  its  doctrine  of  the 
class  struggle,  on  the  untenable  self-interest  psychology 
of  eighteenth  and  much  nineteenth  century  fancy  that 
it  seems  doomed  to  a  similar  fate.  But  Marxian  eco- 
nomics, as  we  shall  see,  is  saved  in  large  part  by  the  in- 
consistency which  enabled  it  to  escape  from  the  self- 
interest  premise  or  "complex,"  to  which,  like  Man- 
chester economics,  it  bound  itself,  but  to  which  it  did 
not  remain  true.  The  intuition  of  Marx  was  even 
greater  than  his  massive  logic. 


In  order  to  understand  just  how  orthodox  economics 
is  ruined  by  its  psychological  presupposition  of  self- 
interest,  while  Marxism  survives  it  we  must  survey 
briefly  the  history  of  modern  psychological  theories 
concerning  the  original  nature  of  man.  In  the  eight- 
eenth century  the  concept  of  self-interest  did  not  seem 
at  all  vague  and  unworkable.  Animals  were  marvelled 
over  as  creatures  of  God-inspired  instincts.  Man  was 

[  129] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

sharply  separated  as  a  creature  of  reason.  As  a  creature 
of  reason  his  self-interest  would  become  a  purely  be- 
nignant force  for  society  as  soon  as  we  reached  that 
state  of  blessed  anarchy  towards  which  all  eighteenth 
century  dreamers  implicitly  or  explicitly  aspired.  But, 
although  anarchists  are  the  most  inspiring  people  in 
the  world,  the  supreme  custodians  of  our  dearest  hopes, 
and  in  a  most  serious  and  important  sense  the  authori- 
ties on  the  subject  of  Utopias  without  visions  of  which 
the  human  race  would  lose  heart,  yet  anarchists  are 
one  and  all  too  psychasthenic  to  work  out  practical 
programs  of  transition  in  details,  or  even  to  give  us 
enduring  scientific  speculations.  Just  what  is  self- 
interest?  Are  we  sure  that  animals  are  instinctive  in 
behavior,  men  rational?  Among  all  anarchists,  from 
Adam  Smith  and  Thomas  Jefferson  to*  Shelley,  to 
Tchernychevsky  to  Tolstoi  we  seek  in  vain  for  reassur- 
ing data.  Meanwhile  along  came  Darwin,  Huxley, 
Romanes  and  others  to  demonstrate  only  too  clearly  that 
there  is  no  such  chasm  between  "instinctive"  animals 
and  "rational"  man.  Amidst  the  many  disillusions  of 
the  nineteenth  century  the  sweetly  fatalistic  belief  in 
man's  rationality  began  to  wane  as  biologists  organized 
their  data  to  throw  further  light  on  the  problem  of 
evolution.  And  just  here,  orthodox  economics,  though 
it  knew  it  not,  was  given  a  death-sentence.  For  if  man 
is  not  notably  rational,  laissez-faire  will  not  bring  the 

[  130] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

millenium.  But  just  here  Marx  was  more  realistic. 
For  if  man  is  not  notably  rational  class-struggles  are 
very  likely  to  be  brute  facts.  Predatory  anarchists, 
like  our  financiers  tend  towards  that  psychasthenic  dis- 
order, which  we  call  paranoia,  with  its  delusions  of 
grandeur  and  its  mania  of  persecution.  Benevolent 
anarchists,  like  Shelley  and  Tchernychevsky,  tend  to- 
wards that  psychasthenic  return  to  childhood,  or  even 
to  prenatal  life,  which  we  term  dementia  praecox.  Far 
be  it  from  me  to  allow  a  greater  insight  to  the  hysterical 
type.  Ultimately  the  psychasthentic  is  more  likely  to 
sound  his  own  soul  more  deeply  and  to  see  farther  into 
the  future  for  mankind  at  large.  He  is  less  likely  to  be 
blinded  by  traditions.  But  the  hysterical  socialist  was 
naturally  more  quick,  in  his  extroverted  way,  to  grasp 
the  external  facts  of  the  harrowing  Victorian  period 
and  to  catch  a  few  of  their  immediate  implications. 
Thus,  though  their  psychological  presupposition  was 
the  identical  false  one  of  Manchesterian  "democrats" 
and  visionary  anarchists,  yet  Marx  and  Engels  wand- 
ered restlessly  about  and  absorbed  so  many  of  the  facts 
of  their  day  that  their  theory  was  more  empirical  and, 
as  economic  theory,  more  enduring,  although  we  now 
have  to  leaven  it  with  some  of  the  Utopian  ideals  which 
they  despised  in  order  to  make  it  the  invincible  suc- 
cessor of  the  senescent  economics  of  respectable  pro- 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

fessors  and  bankers.     But  we  are  anticipating.     This 
will  be  more  clear  presently. 

By  the  time  of  William  James,  psychologists  were 
ready  to  say  that  man  had  more  instincts  than  animals. 
William  James  prepared  a  loose,  but  notable  inventory 
of  instincts  which  he  set  forth  with  his  characteristic 
combination  of  bravery  and  humility.  Recently  Pro- 
fessor Thorndike  has  revised  that  list.  Striking  out 
more  boldly  and  fancifully,  MacDougall  has  described 
elaborately  the  structure  of  instincts  and  listed  off  self- 
assertion  (with  an  accompanying  emotion  of  pride  or 
elation),  self-denial  (including  the  emotion  of  humil- 
ity), flight  (including  fear),  pugnacity  (with  anger), 
curiosity  (with  wonder),  the  parental  instinct  (and 
tender  emotion),  the  gregarious  instinct,  etc.  And 
these  instincts,  we  art  told,  are  often  at  war  with  each 
other.  Just  so,  we  had  been  told  by  Marx,  classes  are 
at  war  with  each  other.  Doubtless  there  is  much  more 
than  a  merely  analogous  relation  between  the  war 
of  instincts  within  the  individual  and  the  war  of  classes 
in  society.  And  if  the  psychoanalysts  could  perfect  our 
technique  for  resolving  within  ourselves  the  war  of  in- 
stincts assuredly  there  would  be  less  class-war  or  at 
least  a  sublimated  class-war.  But  this  would  imply 
that  necessity  for  a  "change  of  heart,"  in  which  Utopian 
(or  dementia  praecox)  anarchists  believed,  but  which 
both  Manchester  (or  paranoid)  anarchists  and 

[  132] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

Marxian  (or  hysterical)  socialists  repudiated  as 
"against  human  nature."  "You  can't  change  human 
nature."  But  what  is  human  nature?  What  is  the  orig- 
inal nature  of  man?  Let  us  return  to  our  history  of 
psychology,  for  this  is  a  psychological  question. 

Man,  as  well  as  animal,  has  instincts.  And  these  in- 
stincts are  at  war  within  the  individual.  Economists 
like  Graham  Wallas,  John  A.  Hobson  and  Carleton  H. 
Parker  find,  therefore,  in  psychology  the  implication 
that  "self-interest"  is  a  very  vague  phrase  to  apply  to 
a  man  torn,  let  us  say,  by  a  conflict  of  tenderness  and 
self-assertion  within  himself.  But  in  the  market-place, 
the  orthodox  paranoiacs  rejoin,  self  interest  reigns. 
Professor  Parker  answered  them  yet  once  more  and 
answered  them  unanswerably:  Is  a  man  utterly  dif- 
ferent in  his  office  from  what  he  is  in  the  bosom  of  his 
family?  So,  putting  away  the  self-interest  psychology 
along  with  all  other  childish  things  we  go  on  with  the 
latest  psychological  findings  concerning  the  original 
nature  of  man.  With  these  findings,  I  repeat,  Man- 
chesterism  is  scattered  to  the  winds,  but  Marxism,  rein- 
forced with  a  leaven  of  Utopian  anarchism,  survives. 

The  most  careful  accounts  of  the  original  nature  of 
man  furnished  by  recent  schools  of  psychology  have 
come  from  the  behaviorists  and  the  psychoanalysts.  I 
believe  the  views  of  these  schools  to  be  reconcilable. 
Both  schools  tend  to  reduce  the  number  of  innate 

[  133] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

human  dispositions,  in  which  James,  Thorndike  and 
MacDougall  have  been  inclined  to  believe.  But  they 
do  not  admit  any  room  for  a  regression  to  the  infantile 
self-interest  psychology. 

Among  behaviorists  we  may  choose  Professor  John 
B.  Watson  as  one  of  the  most  emancipated  and  one  of 
the  most  cautious.  After  prolonged  observation  and 
experiment  he  finds  only  three  emotions  which  seem 
to  him  primal — fear,  anger  and  joy  or  love.  Of  these, 
though  he  himself  does  not  say  so,  joy  or  love  may  be 
the  most  unequivocally  primal.  For  fear  and  anger 
seem  to  require  strange  or  obstructive  influences  in  the 
environment  to  evoke  them,  while  joy  or  love  may 
exist  even  before  the  babe  leaves  the  womb.  Among 
instincts  commonly  listed  I  would  note  also — at  the 
risk  of  overemphasizing  a  part  of  Professor  Watson's 
observations — that  certain  distinctly  possessive  activ  - 
ities  like  manipulation  and  hunting,  of  which  some 
psychologists  have  made  so  much  as  innate,  do  not  to 
Professor  Watson's  behaviorism  seem  so  much  innate 
as  a  bastard  compound  of  random  activities  too  frag- 
mentary to  be  called  instincts  and  of  early  habits  im- 
possible without  environment  and  some  sort  of  arti- 
ficial training.  Bertrand  Russell  has  diagnosed  modern 
society  as  suffering  from  an  over-development  of  "pos- 
sessive," as  opposed  to  "creative  impulses."  Strange 
if  behaviorism,  this  cool  ultra-objective  psychology, 

[134] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

should  restore  the  Utopian  love  of  love,  give  us  new 
hope  that  love  is  the  most  original  of  emotions,  and 
out-Russell  Russell  by  pointing  to  the  conclusion  that 
"possessive  impulses"  are  not  only  over-developed,  but, 
like  hunting  and  manipulation,  to  a  considerable  extent 
artificial,  to  a  considerable  extent  maladaptations. 

Following  an  independent  path,  the  brilliant  Ameri- 
can psychoanalyst,  Doctor  Trigant  Burrow,  finds  quite 
definitely  to  his  satisfaction  that  possessive  impulses  are 
not  really  native  to  man,  but  rather  the  product  of  that 
"repression"  of  his  original  nature  which,  since  the 
great  discoveries  of  Freud,  we  have  found  to  be  an  om- 
nipresent accident  in  the  random  contact  of  human  na- 
ture with  nature.  Nature  is  not  so  benignant  to  us  as 
Wordsworth  thought.  But  perchance  man  is  going  to 
prove  as  fundamentally  beautiful  as  Shelley  and  Tcher- 
nychevsky  and  Tolstoi  longed  to  believe. 

Behaviorism  seems  certainly  not  just  now  to  bar  the 
way  for  such  a  theory.  Once  evolutionists  were  prone 
to  describe  every  biological  activity  as  having  a  "pur- 
pose" in  a  natural  selective  sense.  Now,  more  and  more 
post-Darwinians,  notably  a  behavioristic  psychologist 
like  Doctor  Watson,  make  much  of  "random  activities." 
The  eighteenth  century  was  'partly  right.  The  in- 
stincts of  man  are  few.  But  man  is  not  rational.  And 
so  the  eighteenth  century  was  partly  wrong. 

Yet,  on  the  whole,  the  latest  biology  and  psychology 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

does  something  to  renew  our  hope  in  that  "human  per- 
fectibility" which  glows  in  the  pages  of  eighteenth 
century  dreamers  about  "progress."  Man,  to  be  sure, 
comes  into  the  world  much  more  helpless  than  the  her- 
mit wasp.  Man  has  fewer  instincts  and,  alas,  no  sign 
of  "reason"  to  begin  with.  And  his  native  endowment 
includes  a  mess  of  random  activities  which  may  warp 
him  with  all  sorts  of  perverse  fixations  in  contact  with 
this  bitter  world.  Appalling  thought!  No,  not  alto- 
gether. May  we  not  discover  means  for  the  use  of 
these  random  activities  by  organizing  them  towards 
a  freedom  beyond  the  scope  of  animals  with  their  more 
precise  but  far  more  circumscribed  lives?  Let  us  turn 
to  psychoanalysis. 

Psychoanalysis  talks  of  our  innate  impulses  or 
"wishes"  as  the  "libido."  With  Freud  this  libido  is 
overwhelmingly  "sexual,"  with  Jung  it  is  a  mental 
elan.  Freud's  thought  is  clearer  but  tends  towards  pe- 
dantry. Jung's  is  more  emancipating,  but  vaguer.  We 
may  leave  Jung  aside  just  here  (without  forgetting  his 
magnificent  contributions  to  other  aspects  of  psychoan- 
alysis, particularly  to  its  classificatory  phase  and  to 
the  correlation  of  dreams  of  the  individual  with  myths 
of  the  race)  as  of  little  help  in  our  particular  quest 
for  the  original  nature  of  man.  With  Freud  repres- 
sion is  due  to  sex.  If  you  follow  this  line  of  thought 
you  get  into  many  difficulties  particularly  in  endeavor- 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

ing  to  describe  infantile  sexual  activities  and  in  ex- 
plaining the  wherefore  of  repression  in  more  detail. 
But  Doctor  Burrow  maintains  that  "Repression  is  not 
due  to  sex;  sex  is  due  to  repression."  By  sex  we  mean 
here,  as  common  sense  usually  does,  the  more  obsessive, 
quasi-fetichistic,  possessive  manifestations  of  amorous- 
ness with  all  the  oscillations  of  seduction  and  rivalry 
and  hate  and  jealousy,  of  "winning"  one's  "mistress"  or 
"lord,"  of  the  reckless  generation  of  children,  of  crude 
and  equally  reckless  contraceptive  methods,  of  desper- 
ate bursts  of  asceticism,  of  auto-erotic  flights  from  real- 
ity, of  tragic  homosexual  caricatures  of  friendship,  of 
anxiety  disguising  voluptuous  longings,  of  artificial, 
ritualistic  "tenderness"  disguising  hate,  the  thousand 
and  one  modes  of  feverish  behavior  from  some  of  which 
no  one  of  us  is  free  unless  perchance  psychoanalysis  has 
made  him  whole.  Certainly,  then,  we  would  not  make 
light  of  Freud's  emphasis  on  the  multifariousness  of 
sexual  activity,  fulfilled,  crushed,  and  perverted,  in  our 
distracted  lives;  but  we  would  question  the  inevitability 
of  so  much  sexual  activity,  of  haphazard  and  discordant 
congeries  of  random  activities  now  goaded  on  and  now 
palsied  with  a  profound  self-doubt  and  a  profound  fear, 
hatred,  ignorance  of  life's  facts.  What  if,  deeper  than 
all  this  overt  or  covert  lust,  this  jealousy,  this  ascetic- 
ism, this  perversion,  this  egoism,  we  found  something 
quiet,  not  scornful  of  bodily  communion  when  such 

[137] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

grows  out  of  natural  occasion  and  is  not  possessively 
sought,  but  fundamentally  a  seeking  for  harmony,  iden- 
tification, comradeship.  This  is  not  a  doctrine  to  be 
argued  about  in  a  few  pages.  Perhaps  it  is  not  to  be 
argued  about  at  all,  but  rather  found  by  each  person  for 
himself  when  he  comes  into  a  knowledge  of  himself 
verified  and  made  practical  by  a  long  analysis  of  his 
dreams,  his  "absent-minded"  activity,  of  all  the  reac- 
tions in  which  he  will  find  innumerable  signs  of  his 
feverish  disloyalty  to  himself  and  to  his  fellows  until, 
by  a  tireless  scrutiny  of  his  artificial  layers  of  vileness, 
a  scrutiny  in  the  presence  of  a  psychoanalyst  comrade, 
he  will  feel  a  growing  lightness  of  heart,  a  growing  of 
freedom  to  love  without  fear.  To  come  into  such  a 
knowledge  of  one's  self  is  certainly  to  achieve  a  long 
quest,  an  achievement  to  which  the  present  author 
would  certainly  make  no  pretensions.  Yet  this  view 
seems  to  point  towards  more  light  than  most.  Try  it 
out  faithfully,  experimentally,  and  you  may  find  that  it 
has  a  profound  biological  support 

There  have  been  other  psychoanalysts  who  have  of 
late  groped  towards  a  point  of  view  most  significantly 
similar  to  Doctor  Burrow's  though,  so  far  as  I  under- 
stand them,  less  clear,  less  uncompromising,  less  un- 
equivocal. Doctor  Poul  Bjerre  has  developed  a  strik- 
ing theory  of  hypnosis  which,  despite  the  feud  between 
some  advocates  of  hypnosis  and  those  Freudians  who 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

claim  that  psychoanalysis  is  absolutely  free  from  sug- 
gestion, is  relevant  here. 

Especially  instructive  in  this  regard  is  the  treatment  of  alcoholists 
and  morphinists.  Generally  these  are  easily  approached  through 
hypnosis.  In  order  to  explain  this  fact  the  'dissociation  of  the  nervous 
system'  is  spoken  of,  but  just  what  the  meaning  of  this  phrase  is,  is 
not  pointed  out.  It  seems  to  me  that  the  matter  ought  rather  to  be 
understood  as  a  reflex  reproduction  of  the  intoxication,  in  the  same 
way  as  in  the  chloroform  insensibility.  Patients  who  have  the  mor- 
phine-drowsiness fresh  in  mind,  say  almost  as  in  accord  to  some  rule, 
after  the  first  hypnotic  treatment:  'It  was  exactly  as  if  I  had  had 
morphine!'  One  patient  of  mine,  an  alcoholist,  looked  delighted  and 
exclaimed:  'This  was  just  as  good  as  a  genuine  spree!'  Here  may 
also  be  found  the  cause  for  the  peculiar  fact  that  desire  for  alcohol 
often  disappears  after  the  very  first  hypnosis.  The  patient  no  lon- 
ger needs  the  external  means  for  producing  intoxication;  it  comes 
through  reflex  action.  The  further  treatment  is  then  based 
upon  the  fact  that  the  weaning  from  hypnosis  is  easier  than  is  the 
weaning  from  the  alcohol  habit.  But  as  little  as  with  the  choloroform 
insensibility,  must  hypnosis  be  identified  with  morphine-  or  alcohol- 
intoxication. 

"It  has  been  agreed  upon  by  all  investigators  that  the  possibility  of 
entering  the  hypnotic  state  diminishes  with  years.  That  is  to  say, 
that  with  each  year  the  individual  gets  farther  away  from  this  pos- 
sibility. It  is  then  necessary  to  take  only  one  step  more  to  arrive 
at  the  following: — Hypnosis  is  a  temporary  sinking  back  into  that 
primary  state  of  rest  which  obtained  during  fetal  life. 

"I  also  constitute  the  thing  as  follows: — Birth  is  a  violent  revolu- 
tion through  which  the  hitherto  harmonious  existence  is  rent 
asunder.  The  human  being  comes  into  touch  with  the  external 

[  139] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

world,  and  in  connection  therewith  develops  a  new  state  of  the  organ- 
ism which  we  call  waking  life.  This  condition  must  be  balanced  by 
another  also  new  condition;  so  sleep  comes.  The  two  conditions  are 
contradictions  which  can  be  understood  only  in  and  through  each 
other.  Looked  at  psychologically  we  must  suppose  a  fetal  conscious- 
ness, even  if  this  is  so  far  removed  from  us,  that  we  do  not  see  any 
analogy  at  all  through  which  we  can  comprehend  it.  It  is  as  im- 
possible for  us  to  imagine  a  life  without  consciousness  as  to  imagine 
an  object  which  occupies  no  place  in  space.  Through  the  division  of 
existence  at  birth,  a  development  of  the  consciousness  arises  in  two 
directions:  the  one  has  as  its  goal  our  wide-awake  relation  with  the 
world,  the  other  our  dream  world.  Physiologically  the  organism 
adjusts  itself  to  these  new  demands.  The  element  of  destruction 
which  the  awakening  life  carries  with  it,  makes  it  necessary  that  the 
organism  even  more  strongly  than  before,  may  be  able  to  concen- 
trate itself  upon  the  inner  reconstruction, — as  this  occurs  during  sleep. 

"If  we  reckon  only  with  consciousness  after  birth,  it  is  quite  true 
that  an  existence  is  unrecognized  by  the  psychologist,  where  this 
state  of  primal-rest  is  still  preserved,  although  detached  things  dis- 
appear out  of  it.  In  order  to  understand  the  fact  that  such  a  condi- 
tion shows  itself  during  hypnosis,  it  is  necessary  to  go  back  to  the 
existence  prior  to  birth.  No  matter  how  little  we  may  know  con- 
cerning consciousness  as  existing  in  that  state,  so  much  may  be  quite 
certain, — that  it  is  not  occupied  with  a  single  thing  belonging  to  the 
outside  world.  So  considered  it  may  not  be  too  bold  to  presume  that 
all  the  Nirvana  fantasies  are  added  to  this  trace  of  memory. 

"Concentration  in  itself  takes  the  thought  to  a  time  when  that 
division,  which  the  world  carries  with  it,  had  not  yet  arisen." 

Behold  now  how,  from  an  entirely  different  angle, 
Doctor  S.  Ferenczi  finds  himself  groping  in  the  same 

[ 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

direction  as  he  considers  the  starvation  and  debasement 
of  the  longing  for  friendship.  He  is  not  thinking  of 
rather  mysterious  matters  like  hypnosis  or  prenatal 
life.  But  in  his  survey  of  the  aspirations,  repressions, 
and  perversions  in  western  civilization  he  sees  evidence 
of  a  fundamental  will  to  love  that  has  been  starved  by 
maladaptation.  And,  lest  certain  readers  be  scenting  a 
new  premature  revolt  against  Freud,  let  us  remember 
that  Doctor  Ferenczi  takes  particular  pride  in  his 
orthodox  Freudianism  and  is  recognized  by  the  master 
as  a  faithful  follower.  After  noting  "to  what  an  extent 
present-day  men  have  lost  their  capacity  for  mutual 
affection  and  amiability"  and  the  prevalence  among 
men  of  "decided  asperity,  resistance,  and  love  of  dispu- 
tation" in  place  of  "those  tender  affects  which  were  so 
strongly  pronounced  in  childhood"  he  concludes  that 
this  is  an  abnormal  "affective  displacement"  which 
goads  some  men  towards  homosexualism  and  many 
others  towards  obsessive  desires  for  women  manifested 
in  "  'chivalry'  .  .  .  the  exaggerated,  often  visibly  af- 
fected, adoration  of  woman"  and  in  "Don  Juanism,  the 
obsessive  and  yet  never  fully  satisfied  pursuit  of  con- 
tinually new  heterosexual  adventures."  He  concludes: 

"I  do  not  wish  to  be  misunderstood ;  I  find  it  natural  and  founded 
in  the  psycho-physical  organization  of  the  sexes  that  a  man  loves  a 
woman  incomparably  better  than  his  like,  but  it  is  unnatural  that  a 
man  should  repel  other  men  and  have  to  adore  women  with  an  ob- 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

sessive  exaggeration.  What  wonder  that  so  few  women  succeed  in 
meeting  these  exaggerated  demands  and  in  satisfying,  as  well  as  all 
the  other  ones,  also  the  man's  homo-erotic  needs  by  being  his  'com- 
panion,' without  doubt  one  of  the  commonest  causes  of  domestic  un- 
happiness." 

But  it  would  appear  that  Doctor  Burrow  remains 
unique  in  his  unequivocal  recognition  of  profound  im- 
plications in  the  Freudian  psychology  regarding  the 
original  nature  of  man  which  Freud  himself  has  not 
been  ready  to  recognize.  Unfortunately  the  most  im- 
portant work  of  Doctor  Burrow  remains  unpublished. 
It  may  well  be  that  we  do  him  an  injustice  here  in  pa- 
rading his  views.  But  he  himself,  in  his  study  of  the 
phenomenon  of  "incest-awe,"  has  been  willing  to  pub- 
lish statements  that  are  absolutely  fundamental  for  us  in 
our  consideration  of  the  progress  of  intellectuals  and 
wage-workers  towards  an  entente  and  the  ways  in  which 
this  entente  may  be  facilitated  and  redirected  for  the 
greatest  good  of  society  and  the  individual. 

"The  relation  between  the  mother  and  the  suckling  infant,"  writes 
Doctor  Burrow,  "is  primary  and  biological.  It  is  unitary,  harmoni- 
ous, homogeneous.  For  the  infant  the  relationship  is  an  essentially 
subjective  one.  It  exists  simply,  without  conscious  arrangement  or 
adaptation.  It  is  the  one  single  instance  of  inherent  biological  union 
— the  one  perfect,  complete  phase  of  conjugation.  It  exists  simply 
and  of  itself,  being  exclusive  of  choice,  of  calculation.  It  is  spon- 
taneous, disinterested.  Existing  without  object,  it  is,  so  to  speak, 
one  with  life,  like  the  course  of  the  planets  or  the  growth  of  trees. 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

Being  preconscious,  it  is  in  the  truest  sense  unconscious.  As  I  else- 
where expressed  it,  'the  infant's  organic  consciousness  is,  at  its  biologi- 
cal source  within  the  maternal  envelope,  so  harmoniously  adapted  to 
its  environment  as  to  constitute  a  perfect  continuum  with  it.'  Such 
is  the  character  of  this  original  biological  union  with  the  parent  soil 
— this  mental  oneness  of  the  infant  with  the  maternal  organism. 

"This  unity  with  the  mother,  however,  exists  only  in  respect  to 
the  affective  sphere,  to  the  primary  feelings  and  instincts.  That  is, 
it  belongs  to  the  subjective  life  of  the  organism,  for  there  is  as  yet 
no  cognition,  no  objectivation,  no  contrasting  of  the  ego  with  the 
outer  world,  of  the  self  with  other  selves — no  consciousness  in  the 
habitual  sense. 

"Love  is  unity,  participation,  understanding.  It  is  simple,  har- 
monious, unquestioning.  Love  is  one  with  itself.  It  is  life  in  its  sub- 
jective relation.  Cognition  on  the  contrary  pertains  to  contrast, 
demarcation,  distinction.  Knowledge  is  ulterior;  consciousness 
strategic.  Cognition  is  close  kin  to  pride.  It  is  one  with  self  as  an 
end.  In  other  words,  it  is  synonymous  with  acquisition,  aim,  calcula- 
tion. Hence  it  is  kin  to  self-interest,  to  desire,  that  is  to  say,  to  sex. 

"In  this  view,  then,  the  incest-revolt  is  the  shock  due  to  the  im- 
pact of  consciousness  with  its  inherent  self.  This  is  the  meaning  of 
sex.  This  is  the  meaning  of  sin.  Sin  consists  not  in  nakedness,  but  in 
the  knowledge  of  nakedness — not  in  the  genital  organ,  but  in  the  fig- 
leaf  with  which  it  is  concealed.  It  is  to  behold  our  nakedness.  It  is 
to  objectivate  and  render  conscious  an  inherently  preconscious,  sub- 
jective state  of  being.  This  is  why  sex  is  'impure.'  Convention  does 
not  make  it  so.  It  is  of  itself  impure.  That  is,  it  is  not  simple,  not 
unmixed,  not  unalloyed. 

"I  repeat,  incest  is  not  forbidden,  it  forbids  itself.     It  is  the  pro- 

[143] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

test   of  our   organic   morality.      Its   prohibition   is   inherent.      It   is 
primary  and  biological. 


The  fall  of  man  consisted  in  his  having  eaten  of  the  tree  of  the 
knowledge  of  good  and  evil.  Here  again  knowledge  is  sin.  This 
is  what  is  meant  by  man's  'original  sin.'  "  .  .  Essentially  similar  to 
the  Hebrew  tradition  of  the  fall  of  man,  as  told  in  the  story  of 
Adam  and  Eve,  is  the  Greek  account  of  the  fall,  as  related  in  the 
story  of  Prometheus  and  Pandora.  .  .  . 

"This  prohibition  imposed  upon  hero  or  heroine  against  the  doing 
of  some  one  thing  which  if  done  will  bring  evil  is  the  central  theme 
of  the  folk  unconscious  as  shown  throughout  the  legends  of  myth- 
ology. In  the  legend  of  Psyche  and  Eros,  Psyche  must  never  see  Eros. 
If  she  does,  he  will  not  return.  She  contrives  to  see  him  and  he  is 
lost  to  her.  So  of  Zeus  and  Semele.  Semele  is  beloved  of  Zeus,  but 
must  never  ask  to  see  him  in  all  his  godlike  glory.  She  does  ask 
and  is  withered  by  his  glory.  In  the  story  of  Orpheus  and  Eurydice, 
you  remember  that  Orpheus  can  bring  Eurydice  back  to  life,  if,  lead- 
ing her  from  Hades,  he  will  refrain  from  turning  to  look  at  her.  He 
turns  and  looks  at  her  and  loses  her  forever.  Again,  Elsa  must  not 
ask  the  name  of  Lohengrin.  She  does  so,  and  he  must  depart.  There 
is  a  like  motive  in  the  story  of  Pandora's  box,  in  that  of  Lot's  wife,  in 
the  story  of  Prosperpine  and  others.  In  countless  varieties  of  setting 
this  same  theme  with  its  ever-recurring  prohibition  motive  is  pre- 
sented over  and  over  again  in  the  allegorical  symbols  of  the  race- 
unconscious. 

"That  the  folk  mind  should  be  imbued  with  so  deep  a  conviction  of 
sin,  as  indicated  by  this  general  prohibition  motive  inherent  in  its 
earliest  and  most  durable  legends,  must  indicate  some  deeply  biological 
principle  within  human  consciousness.  It  seems  to  me  that  this  prin- 
ciple is  nothing  less  than  the  innate  abhorrence  of  the  primary  af- 

[  H4] 


fective  sphere  of  consciousness  toward  the  ruthless  incursions  of  an 
alien  objectivity. 

"It  is,  I  believe,  from  this  source  that  has  arisen  the  widespread 
perversion  of  the  human  spirit  which  has  caused  the  hideous  distortion 
of  human  values  embodied  in  the  repressive  subterfuge  and  untruth 
of  our  so-called  moral  codes  and  conventions.  I  cannot  see  the  ex- 
pressions embodied  in  these  reactions  of  the  social  organism  as  other 
than  vicarious  representations  of  an  organic  law  of  life — as  the 
feeble  efforts  of  man's  immature  consciousness  to  compensate  his  es- 
sential nature  for  the  frustration  and  denial  of  his  inherent  life. 
These  distortions  of  life  represent  the  organic  outrage  to  this  innate 
principle  of  unity  within  him  occasioned  by  the  enforced  encroachment 
of  conscious  objectivation  upon  his  original  spontaneous  subjectivity 
and  oneness." 

Before  birth  we  know  love.  In  the  world  we  are 
too  often  afraid  to  love  and  we  express  that  hate  and 
fear,  that  repression  of  love  in  terms  of  obsessive  sex- 
uality (hetero-sexuality,  homo-sexuality,  and  auto- 
eroticism)  and  in  terms  of  that  paranoia  which  we  call 
moral  denunciation  or  moral  prohibition.  Well  may 
Mr.  Graham  Wallas,  in  his  Great  Society,  have  sug- 
gested that  fear,  though  useful  to  animals,  is  probably 
purely  obstructive  in  the  relations  of  men.  Because 
we  are  afraid  in  the  world  to  love,  we  hate,  we  seduce, 
we  capture,  we  flee.  We  fight  to  remove  obstacles  be- 
cause that  seems  the  quickest  way.  It  is  the  most  fev- 
erish way;  it  is  an  insane  combination  of  blind  construc- 
tion and  destruction  with  the  preponderance  of  the 
one  or  the  other  a  matter  of  mere  luck.  Then  we 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

feverishly  try  to  protect  ourselves  by  filling  the  world 
with  miserable  compromise  institutions  called  state, 
church,  property,  marriage. 

The  belief,  then,  that  the  most  salient  feature  of  the 
original  nature  of  man  is  the  wish  to  love  is  a  conclu- 
sion towards  which  more  than  one  of  the  most  forward- 
looking  of  our  psychologist  intellectuals  finds  himself 
impelled  by  the  findings  of  cautious  and  courageous 
research.  Now  it  is  a  profoundly  inspiring  fact  that 
many  of  the  most  militant  wage-workers  today  are 
giving  us  a  large  mass  verification  of  this  hypothesis  of 
the  fundamental  wish  to  love  as  the  basis  of  man's  or- 
iginal nature.  We  must  accept  with  the  Marxists  the 
class-struggle  as  a  fact.  We  may  at  the  same  time  be- 
lieve with  psychoanalysts  like  Doctor  Burrow  that  love 
is  the  primal  and  the  supremely  constructive  human 
agency  if  we  dare  to  recognize  our  autonomy  and  that 
this  love  may  be  more  and  more  emancipated  by  a 
new  education  revised  by  the  psychoanalytical  method. 
How  many  militant  proletarians  are  coming  to  recog- 
nize the  profoundly  revolutionary  and  reconstructive 
value  of  love  will  be  made  clear  when  we  survey  a 
few  significant  tendencies  in  the  psychology  of  direct 
action.  But  we  have  still  uncomplete  the  task  of  show- 
ing the  convergence  of  younger  intellectuals  and 
younger  wage-workers  on  a  fundamental  principle  in 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

economic  theory  as  revised  under  the  influence  of  the 
new  psychology. 

II 

In  the  field  of  economics  the  forward-looking  intel- 
lectual and  the  direct-actionist  among  wage-workers 
are  at  one  in  discerning  the  break-down  of  that  "mar- 
ginal utility  theory  of  values"  which  was  launched  by 
conservatives  against  that  "labor  theory  of  values" 
which  slowly  evolved  out  of  the  democratic  gropings 
of  Locke,  Adam  Smith,  Ricardo,  out  of  a  sort  of  school 
of  nineteenth  century  English  radicals,  and,  above  all, 
out  of  Karl  Marx.  The  marginal  utility  theory  of 
values,  based  on  a  self-interest  psychology,  makes 
value  the  relation  between  an  object  and  one  of  man's 
less  fundamental,  possessive  wishes.  It  tries  to  elevate 
the  "ego-complex"  of  a  man  into  the  whole  man.  Man 
himself  does  indeed  often  try  pathetically  to  deceive 
himself  into  mistaking  his  ego-complex  for  his  whole 
personality.  The  pathos  and  comedy  of  this  is  well 
illustrated  by  Professor  Edwin  B.  Holt  apropos  of  a 
boy's  wish  for  tobacco  which  would  be  a  perfectly 
legitimate  economic  valuation  under  the  marginal 
utility  theory. 

"Tobacco,  like  long  trousers,  figures  in  the  paraphernalia  of  adults, 
and  to  'act  grown-up'  is  a  very  common  boyish  wish,  or  mode  of  be- 
havior. This  wish  is  one  component  of  a  large  complex  of  inter- 
related responsive  settings,  the  'ego-complex'  ...  It  is  apt  to 

[147] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

have  such  variant  forms  and  associates  as  the  wish  to  be  inde- 
pendent, 'to  do  as  I  like'  (of  which  the  exaggerated  form  is  the 
general  wish  to  disobey),  to  go  with  big  boys,  to  be  a  sea-captain,  cow- 
boy or  pirate.  Now  these,  which  with  their  like  are  all  that  lend 
charm  to  tobacco  as  an  implement  of  boyhood,  are  all  the  clear  out- 
growths of  the  still  earlier  wish  to  'run  away'  from  home,  so  often 
seen  in  children  of  ten  and  less.  This  in  turn  is  no  innate  tendency 
and  must  derive  its  impetus  from  somewhere.  It  does,  and  from 
just  such  sources  as  that  which  I  first  mentioned — an  injudicious 
mother  (or  father)  undertaking  to  be  a  fence  between  the  child  and 
its  little  bauble  of  flame.  The  cautious  reaction  was  then  secured 
toward  flame-plus-mother;  but  the  innate  tendency  to  reach  out  to- 
ward flame  (which  in  turn  gets  its  energy  from  the  flame  stimulus 
direct)  was  not  modified,  as  it  would  have  been  if  the  mother  had 
trusted  the  simple  truth  that  flame  is  hot.  She  wished  to  teach  the 
child  to  avoid  flame;  what  she  did  teach  it  was  to  avoid  her  (as 
being  the  impediment,  which  the  flame  itself  ought  to  have  been, 
to  its  innate  tendency).  This  and  similar  misdirections  on  the 
parents'  part  soon  produce  a  child  that  toddles  off  down  the  street 
in  the  aim  of  running  away  from  home,  and  that  later,  in  the  desire 
to  act  grown-up  and  independent,  assembles  a  gang  of  street  gamins 
behind  the  barn  to  smoke  cigarettes  and  gulp  down  poison  from  a 
whiskey  bottle.  For  these  children  have  been  taught  that  fire  does 
not  burn.  But  all  this  must  not  be,  and  so  the  father  finds  himself 
'forced'  to  get  a  rawhide  whip;  with  which  he  adds  fear  to  the  al- 
ready existing  tendencies  which  make  the  child  wish  to  act  and  to 
be  'grown-up'  and  forever  away  from  parental  restraints.  When 
such  motor  settings  are  once  established  in  a  child,  almost  every  ob- 
ject in  the  environment  tends  to  stimulate  them  to  action ;  and  so 
the  nervous  paths  of  disobedience  are  amply  energized.  Tobacco  is 
notably  such  an  object." 

[i48] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

This  points  well  the  contrast  between  the  feverish, 
possessive  strainings  for  a  false  independence  (that 
competitive  coercion  of  others  which  we  call  the  ego- 
complex)  and  the  quiet,  real  independence  which  re- 
joices in  free  comradeship  with  others  (which  we  call 
the  spirit  of  autonomy) .  What  happens  to  us  when  we 
are  led  by  the  nose  by  our  ego-complex?  In  trying  to 
save  ourselves  we  lose  ourselves.  We  disintegrate  into  a 
petulant  and  explosive  bundle  of  whims.  Similarly,  or- 
thodox economics,  in  trying  to  save  itself  by  the  glorifi- 
cation of  the  ego-complex  and  by  making  value  the  rela- 
tion between  an  object  and  the  ego-complex,  has  disin- 
tegrated into  a  bundle  of  fragmentary  subjects.  Pro- 
fessor W.  H.  Hamilton  has  well  shown  how,  because 
of  the  untenability  of  the  orthodox  theory  of  value,  the 
so-called  economics  of  our  colleges  today  is  not  a  sci- 
ence at  all  but  an  unorganized  group  of  studies  (trans- 
portation, banking,  taxation,  labor,  etc.)  which,  how- 
ever useful  they  may  be  as  collections  of  observations 
on  special  subjects,  have  no  shred  of  that  continuity 
which  is  necessary  for  the  large  control  that  certificates 
a  science. 

Meanwhile  the  militant  proletarian  recognizes  the 
truth  of  what  Marx  said  about  the  "class-struggle,"  the 
"labor  theory  of  values,"  and  the  right  of  the  worker 
to  that  'surplus  value'  of  which  he  has  been  dispos- 
sessed under  the  wage-system. 

[H9] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

Marx  and  the  militant  wage-worker  of  today  are 
right.  For  value,  real  value  is  not  the  relation  between 
a  volatile,  artificial,  possessive  wish  and  an  object. 
Value,  that  is  to  say,  value  which  is  to  be  useful  and 
intelligible  as  a  controlling  phase  of  scientific  method, 
is  the  relation  between  the  whole  mind  of  man  and  an 
object.  And  the  mind  of  man,  according  to  the  psycho- 
biology  of  Doctor  Meyer,  according  to  behaviorism 
and  psychoanalysis,  in  other  words  according  to  all 
dynamic  modern  psychology,  the  mind  of  man  is  his 
integrated  behavior,  not  one  reflex  action,  one  detached 
appetite,  not  his  head,  liver,  kidneys,  or  heart,  not  a 
maladaptation  or  travesty  of  freedom  like  the  ego-com- 
plex. Karl  Marx  was  blunderingly  on  the  right  track 
when  he  mingled  economic  theory  and  moralistic  agita- 
tion. Bourgeois  economics  has  made  sport  of  this— 
and  done  the  same  thing  far  more  crudely  itself.  But 
modern  wage-workers  see  in  their  rough  and  ready  way 
what  academic  economists  did  not  see  but  what  really 
contemporaneous  students  of  the  logic  of  science  like 
John  Dewey  and  other  forward-looking  intellectuals 
have  discovered  that  an  utter  distinction  between  "nor- 
mative" and  "descriptive"  science  is  unsound,  unwork- 
able, that  "every  science  aspires  to  be  an  art"  and  logi- 
cally must  so  aspire,  that  economics  and  ethics  there- 
fore cannot  be  separated.  And  modern  psychology,  as 
Holt  shows,  supports  the  old  Socratic  dictum  that  vir- 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

tue  is  cool  wisdom,  not  paranoidal  "projections,"  i.e. 
feverish  searches  for  the  mote  in  our  neighbor's  eye 
regardless  of  the  beam  in  our  own.  And  wisdom,  we 
now  see,  is  composed  of  attitudes  or  acts,  implicit  and 
overt,  it  is  the  integrated  behavior  of  a  healthy  human 
being,  naturally  free,  seeking  no  support  in  the  approval 
or  disapproval  of  one's  fellows,  but  suffused  with  that 
warm,  serene  love  of  one's  fellows  for  which  man  was 
perfected  in  the  harmonious  temple  of  his  mother's 
womb.  Now  the  Marxian  emphasis  on  "socially  neces- 
sary" labor  power  as  the  measure  of  value  is  really  an 
emphasis  on  the  integrated  behavior  of  a  man  who  is 
what  Christ  would  have  called  "whole."  Marx  is  really 
much  closer  than  many  of  his  friends  and  foes  have 
thought  to  John  Ruskin  who  said,  "There  is  no  wealth 
but  life." 

Against  the  ego-complex  of  the  capitalists,  then, 
indeed  for  the  sake  of  the  capitalists  themselves,  self- 
deceived  as  they  are  by  long  indulgence  of  their  pos- 
sessive and  excited  random  activities  and  badly  formed 
habits,  proletarians  may,  quite  scientifically  and  with 
a  serene  sense  of  autonomy  that  is  the  only  possible 
basis  for  true  love  and  sound  co-operation,  insist  upon 
that  right  to  create  freely  which  will  necessitate  the 
abolition  of  the  wage-system,  the  organization  of  sur- 
plus-value "for  the  common  good,"  and  the  abolition 
of  private  ownership  of  the  paranoidal  variety.  In  vain 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

will  our  moribund  orthodox  economics  prate  of  "ex- 
change value"  (a  relation  between  a  capricious,  uninte- 
grated  wish  and  an  object,  involving  suppression,  ex- 
cess, and  compromise)  and  what  they  call  "real  value" 
(a  revival  of  an  untenable  mediaeval  conception  of 
value  as  a  quality  inherent  in  an  object  that  is  some- 
how quite  independent  of  the  knower).  There  is 
dawning  a  social  organization  in  which  it  will  be  seen 
that  all  economic  goods  can  be  rationally  valued  only 
in  terms  of  the  socially  necessary  and  joyous  labor  that 
contributes  to  their  production,  a  society  in  which  work- 
ers will  logically  control,  at  least  in  considerable  part, 
what  they  produce  through  their  harmonious  fellow- 
ships, industrial  unions,  Soviets,  or  guilds.  In  vain  do 
orthodox  economists  aver  with  pseudo-realistic  unction 
that  they  deal  impartially  with  the  "is,"  not  rhapsodi- 
cally  with  the  "ought."  Thus  they  take  refuge  in  that 
old,  impossible  dualism  of  the  "physical"  and  the  "spir- 
itual" rephrased  as  a  dualism  of  "fact"  and  "ideal." 
Neither  capitalist  nor  laborer  pays  notable  heed.  Both 
of  these  practical  individuals  insist  upon  dealing  with 
the  "ought"  as  often  as  the  "is"  and,  while  recognizing 
a  certain  working  distinction  between  "facts"  and 
"ideals,"  insist  that  any  practical  conduct  and  any  vital 
science  will  consider  both.  In  consequence,  economics, 
which  surely  aims  to  be  a  help  to  capitalist,  laborer,  or 
both,  must  come  perilously  close  to  ethics  and  psy- 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

chology  and  discourse  occasionally  about  autonomy, 
justice,  and  integration,  or  land  in  the  mental  treadmill, 
and  feebly  iterate  that  whatever  is  is. 

Man  is  not  the  mere  creature  of  pleasures  and  pains 
even  when  most  concentrated  on  economic  activities. 
His  mind  is  not  to  be  partitioned  off  into  a  sort  of  quilt 
of  little  mutually  independent  units,  convenient  mathe- 
matical functions  of  units  of  material  economic  goods 
any  more  than  his  mind  is  to  be  regarded  as  a  mere 
collection  of  unintegrated  reflex  actions  each  exclu- 
sively devoted  to  its  particular  stimulus.  As  actions 
become  more  and  more  characteristic  of  a  human  per- 
sonality the  importance  of  specific  stimuli  wanes,  the 
importance  of  an  organizing  purpose  waxes.  This 
larger  purpose  is  the  value  relation.  So  the  present 
capitalist  system,  with  ingenious  economic  rationali- 
zation, turns  out  to  be  an  impossible  system  for  the  sane 
human  mind.  And  no  sane  human  mind  can  remain 
content  with  merely  "describing"  or  "explaining"  what 
happens  to  exist  in  the  market-place.  There  is  nothing 
fundamentally  unscientific,  then,  in  the  ethical  crusade 
of  militant  proletarians  against  the  system  of  capitalism 
with  its  irrational  horrors.  This  system  is  hate.  A 
crusade  against  it  is  that  hate  of  hate  which  is  the  love 
of  love. 

It  must  be  admitted,  however,  that  some  proletarians 
overemphasize  the  power  that  must  be  correlated  with 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

production.  We  must  with  Mr.  G.  D.  H.  Cole  concede 
that  "the  consumer,  the  person  for  whom  the  goods  are 
made,  must  decide,"  at  least  within  certain  limits, 
"what  is  to  be  produced,  when  it  is  to  be  produced,  and 
in  what  quantities."  As  Mr.  Cole  points  out,  we  need 
the  State  as  the  organized  will  of  the  consumer  to  offset 
the  possible  tyranny  of  producers'  guilds.  Such  a  State 
would  not  be  very  much  like  the  present  State  which  is, 
as  Doctor  Burrow  could  demonstrate,  a  compromise,  a 
"symptom"  exactly  like  the  physiological  "symptoms" 
with  which  hysterical  individuals  hide  their  own  deep- 
est desires  from  themselves  and  coerce  the  terrified  and 
over-indulgent  members  of  their  families.  Every 
healthy  person  is  both  a  producer  and  a  consumer  and 
he  should  rejoice  in  identifying  himself  with  organi- 
zations which  give  the  highest  expression  to  each  of 
these  activities.  Non-producers  and  excessive  consu- 
mers would,  in  such  a  society,  be  treated  as  sick  people 
by  psychiatrical  and  general  medical  methods,  which 
would  eventuate  in  cure  or  humane  segregation  as  ne- 
cessity dictated.  There  would  be  little  room  for  those 
sadistic  activities  which  we  self-righteously  denominate 
as  "just  punishment."  But  we  had  best  linger  for  a 
longer  space  over  our  economic  meditations  before  we 
elaborate  on  the  kind  of  State  in  which  a  sane  and  sin- 
cere individual  could  find  identification. 

In  due  time  the  wage-workers,  in  concert  with  the 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

pioneer  intellectuals  who  share  their  proletarianism, 
will  reconceive  the  State.  Meanwhile,  in  the  economic 
sphere,  inspired  in  part  by  the  magnificent  if  some- 
what confused  philosophy  of  Marx  and  inspired  even 
more  by  their  own  evolving  conations,  the  wage-work- 
ers are  formulating  in  constantly  increasing  numbers 
the  hypotheses  of  "self-government  in  industry"  and 
"abolition  of  the  wage  system."  With  these  hypotheses 
they  enter  into  the  great  task  of  experimental  verifica- 
tion through  their  marvellously  flexible  and  constantly 
changing  trade  unions  which,  with  their  fairly  fluid 
structural  variations  (craft,  occupational,  industrial, 
federation,  amalgamation,  etc.)  and  their  very  fluid 
functional  variations  (mutual  benefit,  collective  bar- 
gaining, boycott,  label,  sabotage,  strikes  of  various 
kinds)  constitute  the  most  tremendous  laboratory  ever 
reared  by  the  cunning,  the  audacity,  and  the  nobility 
of  men. 

In  England,  for  nearly  a  century,  intellectuals  have 
been  working  towards  an  entente  with  wage-workers. 
Robert  Owen,  Charles  Kingsley,  John  Ruskin,  Thomas 
Huxley,  Frederic  Harrison,  William  Morris,  Sidney 
and  Beatrice  Webb,  these  are  only  a  few  of  the  wide 
ranging  and  illustrious  minds  that  have  found  more  or 
less  to  identify  themselves  with  in  the  lives  of  the  wage- 
workers.  The  youngest  of  the  British  intellectuals, 
the  brilliant  guild  socialists,  may  well  furnish  us  with 

' 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

that  residuum  of  economic  theory  which  will  be  ad- 
missible in  a  book  of  this  scope.  These  guildsmen  are 
proud  to  record  that  their  data  are  largely  provided  by 
the  conduct  of  laborers,  that  their  theories  are  little 
more  than  the  clearer  articulation  of  those  propounded 
by  the  more  thoughtful  minority  of  laborers,  particu- 
larly those  of  France,  England,  and  America  (viz,  the 
I.  W.  W.  and  other  "industrial  unionists").  They  are 
proud  to  note  that  their  theories,  after  being  tricked 
out  in  the  robes  of  the  intellectuals,  are  again  espoused 
by  a  growing  number  of  English  laborers,  particularly 
in  the  "Triple  Alliance."  We  shall  be  able  to  under- 
stand this  after  we  have  sketched  an  episode  in  the  his- 
tory of  direct  action  in  the  British  labor  movement. 
Meanwhile  let  us  round  out  our  economic  theory  with 
the  brilliant  sentences  of  two  leading  guildsmen,  Mr. 
S.  G.  Hobson  and  Mr.  A.  R.  Orage. 

"The  fundamental  fact,  common  to  every  kind  of  wage,  is  the  abso- 
lute sale  of  the  labor  commodity,  which  thereby  passes  from  the  seller 
to  the  buyer  and  becomes  the  buyer's  exclusive  property.  This  ab- 
solute sale  conveys  to  the  buyer  absolutely  possession  and  control  of 
the  products  of  the  purchased  labor  commodity  and  stops  the  seller 
of  the  labor  commodity  from  any  claim  upon  the  conduct  of  the 
industry.  The  wage-earner's  one  function  is  to  supply  labor  power 
at  the  market  price.  That  once  accomplished,  he  is  economically  of 
no  further  consideration. 

"If  .  .  .  we  transform  the  conventional  conception  of  the  economic 

[156] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

function  of  labor  by  crediting  it  with  its  proper  human  attributes  and 
rejecting  the  pure  commodity  thesis  sans  phrase,  then  we  remove  labor 
from  the  wages  or  inanimate  category  to  the  living  or  active  category 
of  rent,  interest  and  profits.  This  intellectual  process  accomplished, 
we  have  revolutionized  political  economy ;  labor  is  at  last  in  a  position 
to  contend  with  rent,  interest  and  profits  for  the  'first  charge'  upon 
production.  Whether  it  can,  in  fact,  secure  that  first  charge  depends 
upon  its  power  of  economic  organization — upon  its  will  and  power  to 
constitute  productive  and  distributing  guilds.  And  upon  the  power 
and  capacity  of  labor  (the  human  energy,  not  the  commodity)  thus 
to  organize  itself  upon  a  sound  economic  basis  depends  the  final  test 
of  democracy  as  a  living  principle.  If  labor,  as  we  believe,  can  ef- 
fectively organize  itself,  producing  and  exchanging  commodities  more 
efficiently  than  is  done  under  the  wage  system,  then  we  shall  speedily 
discover  that  whilst  wages  under  the  present  system  have  no  charge 
upon  production,  labor,  organized  into  guilds,  would  have  a  first, 
second  and  third  charge  not  only  upon  production,  but  upon  the  in- 
dustrial structure  as  a  whole, 

"The  problem  of  economic  organization  is  almost  as  important  as 
the  problem  of  economic  resources.  A  community  rich  in  natural 
wealth,  but  defective  in  organization,  may  find  its  economic  position 
inferior  to  a  community,  poor  in  natural  resources,  but  effectively 
organized  for  economic  purposes.  This  becomes  mote  and  more  a 
truism  with  the  growth  and  efficiency  of  transportation  facilities. 
Thus  Lancashire,  which  does  not  grow  an  ounce  of  cotton,  is  the 
cotton  centre  of  the  world.  Organization  is  the  clue  to  what  will 
prove  a  mystery  to  the  historian  a  thousand  years  hence.  Now  the 
wage  system  is  uneconomic,  not  only  or  even  primarily  because  it  is 
based  upon  a  false  conception  of  the  nature  of  labor,  but  because  it 
is  the  fruitful  parent  of  faulty  and  uneconomic  organization.  The 
concentration  of  surplus  value  in  the  possession  of  a  small  class  in- 

[157] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

evitably  circumscribes  the  human  area  from  which  organizing  capac- 
ity may  be  drawn. 

"At  the  outset  we  arc  met  by  the  fact,  becoming  more  apparent 
every  day,  that  the  rack  wage  system  in  itself  is  immoral;  that  is,  it 
does  violence  to  the  natural  instinct  of  man.  It  is  not  to  be  denied 
that  the  realization  of  the  immorality  of  one  class  of  men  reducing 
another  class  to  and  maintaining  them  in  a  condition  of  property!  ess- 
ness  in  order  to  exploit  their  wage  labor  for  private  profit  has  been 
slow  in  coming.  Even  at  this  moment  the  realization  is  confined  to 
a  comparatively  few  minds.  But  the  analogy  of  the  wage  system 
with  chattel  slavery  even  in  this  respect  is  striking ;  for  it  took  several 
milleniums  for  society  to  realize  that  chattel  slavery  was  fundament- 
ally contrary  to  the  nature  of  man.  When,  however,  this  immorality 
was  realized,  and,  above  all,  felt,  the  economic  system  dependent  upon 
it  was  doomed.  ...  In  the  end  ...  we  believe  that  what  is  morally 
right  is  economically  right;  it  is  in  this  faith  that  moral  reformers 
and  practical  economists  find  themselves  so  often  on  the  same  side. 

"The  abolition  of  the  wage  system  involves  not  merely  an  eco- 
nomic revolution,  but  ex  hypothesis,  a  spiritual  revolution  also.  A 
spiritual  revolution,  indeed,  will  be  necessary  as  a  precedent  condition 
of  the  economic  revolution;  for  we  are  not  so  blind  to  the  lessons 
of  history  as  to  imagine  that  an  economic  revolution  for  the  better 
can  be  engineered  by  force  and  greed  alone.  Would  then  this 
spiritual  revolution  which  we  hypothecate  be  likely  to  destroy  what  is 
already  spiritually  desirable  in  existing  society?  Rather  it  seems  es- 
sential that  it  should  come  not  to  destroy,  but  to  fulfill;  not  to  make 
a  complete  break  with  its  own  spiritual  past,  but  to  release  that  past 
for  new  conquests.  And  in  this  assumption  we  are  supported  not  only 
by  reason,  but  by  facts  manifest  to  everybody.  For  it  is  clear  to-day, 
if  it  was  never  clear  before,  that  spirituality  of  mind,  culture  and 

[158] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

innate  taste,  are  not  now,  if  they  once  appeared  to  be,  the  monop- 
olies of  any  one  class.  They  can  no  more  confidently  be  looked  for 
among  the  wealthy,  leisured  classes  of  today  than  among  the  artisan 
and  professional  classes.  The  gloomy  forebodings  of  Mr.  Balfour 
that  literature,  science  and  art  would  droop  and  die  under  the  demo- 
cratization of  industry  are  based,  therefore,  upon  a  profound  mis- 
apprehension of  the  distribution  among  our  nation  of  the  spiritual 
qualities  of  which  he  speaks.  It  is  the  nation  that  has  always  pro- 
duced them ;  and  the  nation  may  be  relied  upon  to  continue  to  produce 
them. 

"Even  today,  with  the  mass  of  the  population  degraded  by  wage 
slavery,  is  it  the  young  aristocrat  or  the  young  democrat  who  dreams 
dreams?  Is  it  the  Pall  Mall  lounger  or  the  untiring  Socialist  worker 
in  the  provinces  who  lives  in  ideas?  Is  it  the  young  man  just  down 
from  Oxford  or  Cambridge,  or  the  studious  working  man  who  today 
soaks  himself  in  genuine  literature?  Publishers,  booksellers  and 
librarians  could  tell  Mr.  Balfour  strange  stories  on  this  head." 

Ill 

In  the  field  of  politics  there  is  a  growing  movement 
on  the  part  of  radical  intellectuals  and  adventurous 
wage-workers  towards  what  we  may  call  neo-federal- 
ism.  We  see  it  in  the  movement  of  some  individual 
churches  for  emancipation  from  capitalism  as  exem- 
plified by  the  superb  exodus  of  Doctor  John  Haynes 
Holmes  and  his  congregation  from  their  endowed  edi- 
fice; in  the  so-called  "sociological  school"  of  lawyers  in 
America  (Justice  Brandeis,  Doctor  Frankfurter,  etc.) 
in  French  and  Italian  syndicalism;  in  German  "inde- 
pendent socialism"  and  sparticism;  in  the  agitations 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

of  the  American  I.W.W.  against  the  well  developed 
"Servile  State"  in  Australia  and  against  its  incipient 
analogue  in  the  United  States;  in  the  growing  talk  about 
"academic  freedom"  in  the  United  States;  in  British 
guild  socialism;  in  the  French  writings  of  Duguit  and 
others;  in  the  English  writings  of  Maitland  and  others; 
in  Mr.  Harold  J.  Laski's  two  brilliant  volumes  recently 
published  in  America;  above  all,  in  the  indomitable 
soviet  experiment  in  Russia  whether  this  be  destined  for 
crucifixion  or  acclaim,  at  all  events  immortalized  as  the 
savior  of  the  new  society  of  the  twentieth  century. 

Today  it  is  obvious  that  the  State  is  not  the  will  of 
the  organized  consumers  or  of  any  totality  or  majority 
except  in  so  far  as  inertia  and  superstition  are  to  be 
regarded  as  the  fundamental  traits  of  the  totality  or 
majority.  The  State  is  the  will  of  various  limited 
groups  who  happen  to  be  in  power.  And  the  power 
which  they  possess  is  a  psychopathological  phenome- 
non. How  are  we  to  define  the  State  in  terms  which 
will  not  blink  the  facts  or  outrage  our  ideals?  We  may 
accept  Mr.  Cole's  definition :  "A  State  is  nothing  more 
or  less  than  the  political  machinery  of  government  in  a 
community."  We  may  with  him  deplore  the  widely 
current  monistic  confusion  of  the  terms  "State"  and 
"Community."  We  will  agree  with  him  that  "the  real 
action  of  the  State  in  any  time  or  place  is  ...  deter- 
mined by  the  distribution  of  power  in  the  community," 

[160] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

that  "political  power  is  in  itself  nothing,"  that  political 
power  is  important  only  as  "the  expression  of  social 
power"  which  "may  assume  many  forms  military,  ec- 
clesiastical, agrarian,  economic,  industrial — but  under 
most  conditions,  it  is  inevitably  in  the  main  economic 
and  industrial  in  character,"  that  "capitalism  contrib- 
utes the  funds  of  the  great  parties,  and  therefore  con- 
trols their  policies"  in  the  main,  even  though  we  admit 
that  "this  domination  of  capitalism  is  not  absolute." 
Mr.  Cole's  following  paragraphs  are  most  clear  and 
inclusive  for  our  purposes. 

"As  a  territorial  or  geographical  association,  the  State  is  clearly 
marked  out  as  the  instrument  for  the  execution  of  those  purposes 
which  men  have  in  common  by  reason  of  'neighborhood.'  It  is  easiest 
to  make  plain  the  meaning  of  this  principle  by  taking  first  the  case 
of  a  municipal  body.  That  body  represents  all  the  citizens  as  en- 
joyers  in  common  of  the  land,  housing,  amenities  and  social  char- 
acter of  the  city.  The  municipal  council,  is,  therefore,  or  would  be 
if  it  were  democratic,  the  proper  body  to  deal  with  those  public  mat- 
ters which,  broadly  speaking,  affect  all  the  citizens  equally  and  in  the 
same  way,  that  is,  affect  them  as  citizens.  It  has  not  the  same  prima 
facie  qualification  for  dealing  with  those  matters  which  affect  the 
citizens  in  different  ways,  according  as  they  happen  to  be  bakers  or 
tramwaymen,  Protestants  or  Catholics.  The  municipal  council  rep- 
resents the  individuals  who  inhabit  the  city  as  'users'  or-  'enjoyers'  in 
common,  and  is  qualified  to  legislate  on  matters  of  'use'  and  'enjoy- 
ment' ;  but  if  we  would  represent  individuals  as  bakers  or  tramway- 
men,  Protestants  or  Catholics,  we  must  seek  other  forms  of  organ- 
ization in  which  these  things  are  made  the  basis  of  representation. 

[161] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

"The  case  is  the  same  with  the  national  State.  Parliament  does, 
in  so  far  as  it  is  democratic,  represent  men  as  'users'  or  'enjoyers'  in 
common,  this  time  on  a  national  instead  of  a  local  basis.  It  is,  there- 
fore, qualified  to  deal  with  matters  of  national  'use'  or  'enjoyment'; 
but  it  is  not  equally  qualified  in  those  matters  which  affect  men  dif- 
ferently according  as  they  are  miners  or  raihvaymen,  Catholics  or 
Protestants. 

"The  theory  of  State  Sovereignty  falls  to  the  ground,  if  this  view 
of  the  fundamental  nature  of  the  State  is  correct.  State  Sovereignty, 
if  the  phrase  has  any  meaning  at  all,  implies,  not,  indeed,  that  the 
State  ought  to  interfere  in  every  sphere  of  human  action,  but  that  the 
State  has  ultimately  a  right  to  do  so.  It  regards  the  State  as  the  rep- 
resentative of  the  community  in  the  fullest  sense,  and  as  the  superior 
both  of  the  individual  'subject'  and  of  every  other  form  of  association. 
It  regards  the  State  as  the  full  and  complete  representative  of  the 
individual,  whereas,  if  the  view  just  put  fonvard  is  correct,  the  State 
only  represents  the  individual  in  his  particular  aspect  of  'neighbor,' 
'user'  and  'enjoyer.'  The  advocates  of  State  Sovereignty,  if  they  do 
not  regard  the  State  as  being  the  community,  do  at  least  regard  it  as 
'sustaining  the  person  of  the  community,'  whereas  our  whole  view  is 
that  the  person  of  the  community  cannot  truly  be  sustained  by  any 
single  form  of  organization. 

"This  difference  of  views  appears  most  distinctly  when  we  sur- 
vey the  differing  views  taken  by  various  schools  of  thought  concern- 
ing the  nature  of  associations  other  than  the  State,  and  their  relation 
to  the  State.  A  controversy,  medieval  in  its  origin,  but  revived  in 
modern  times,  has  centred  round  this  question,  and  has  derived  topical 
interest  in  our  own  day  and  from  our  special  point  of  view,  because 
it  has  arisen  in  an  acute  form  in  connection  with  the  legal  position 
of  Trade  Unionism.  The  Osborne  decision,  which  rendered  illegal 
the  use  of  Trade  Union  funds  for  political  purposes,  was  based  upon 
a  totally  wrong  conception  of  the  nature  of  Trade  Unionism.  Special 

[162] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

legislation  accordingly  had  to  be  passed  to  restore  to  the  Unions  even 
a  modified  freedom  in  this  respect. 

"The  real  principle  at  issue  was  greatly  more  important  than  the 
important  special  point  involved.  The  judges,  in  giving  their  de- 
cision, were  really  affirming  their  view  that  Trade  Union  rights  are 
purely  the  creation  of  statute  law  and  that  Trade  Unions  themselves 
are  artificial  bodies  created  by  statute  to  perform  certain  functions. 
Some  opponents  of  the  Osborne  decision,  on  the  other  hand,  expressed 
the  view  that  a  Trade  Union  is  not  a  creature  of  statute  law,  but  a 
natural  form  of  human  association,  and,  therefore,  capable  of  growth 
and  the  assumption  of  new  purposes.  In  short,  there  was  really,  on 
the  one  side,  the  view  that  all  the  rights  and  powers  of  other  forms 
of  association  are  derived  from  the  State,  and,  on  the  other  side, 
the  view  that  these  rights  and  powers  belong  to  such  associations  by 
virtue  of  the  nature  and  the  purposes  for  which  they  exist. 

"Let  us  now  try  to  apply  the  view  which  we  have  taken  of  the 
State's  real  nature  to  this  particular  case.  Trade  Unions  are  asso- 
ciations based  on  the  'vocational'  principle.  They  seek  to  group 
together  in  one  association  all  those  persons  who  are  co-operating  in 
making  a  particular  kind  of  thing  or  rendering  a  particular  kind  of 
service.  In  the  common  phrase,  they  are  associations  of  'producers,' 
using  'production'  in  the  widest  sense.  The  State,  on  the  other  hand, 
we  have  decided  to  regard  as  an  association  of  'users'  or  'enjoyers,'  or 
'consumers,'  in  the  common  phrase.  If  this  view  is  right,  we  cannot 
regard  Trade  Unions  as  deriving  their  rights,  including  the  right  to 
exist,  from  the  State.  Associations  of  producers  and  consumers  alike 
may  be  said,  in  a  sense,  to  derive  these  rights  from  the  community ;  but 
we  cannot  conceive  of  an  association  of  producers  deriving  its  right 
to  exist  from  an  association  of  'users.' 

"Our  view,  then,  of  the  nature  of  rights  of  vocational  and  other 
forms  of  association  is  profoundly  modified  by  the  view  we  have  taken 
of  the  nature  of  the  State.  We  now  see  such  associations  as  natural 

[163] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

expressions  and  instruments  of  the  purposes  which  certain  groups  of 
individuals  have  in  common,  just  as  we  see  the  State,  both  in  national 
and  in  local  government,  as  the  natural  expression  and  instrument  of 
other  purposes  which  the  same  individuals  have  in  common  when 
they  are  grouped  in  another  way.  Similarly,  our  whole  view  of  the 
relation  of  the  State  to  other  forms  of  association  is  profoundly  modi- 
fied, and  we  come  to  see  the  State,  not  as  the  'divine'  and  universally 
sovereign  representative  of  the  community,  but  as  one  among  a  num- 
ber of  forms  of  association  in  which  men  are  grouped  according  to 
the  purposes  which  they  have  in  common.  Men  produce  in  common, 
and  all  sorts  of  association,  from  the  medieval  guild  to  the  modern 
trust  and  the  modern  Trade  Union,  spring  from  their  need  to  co- 
operate in  production;  they  use  and  enjoy  in  common,  and  out  of 
their  need  for  common  action  and  protection  in  their  use  and  enjoy- 
ment spring  the  long  series  of  States,  the  various  phases  of  co-opera- 
tion, the  increasing  developments  of  local  government.  They  hold 
views  in  common,  and  out  of  their  common  opinions  spring  propa- 
gandists and  doctrinaire  associations  of  every  sort;  they  believe  in 
common,  and  out  of  their  need  for  fellowship  and  worship  spring 
churches,  connections  and  covenants. 

"In  all  this  diversity  of  human  association,  the  State  can  claim  an 
important  place,  but  not  a  solitary  grandeur.  States  exist  for  the 
execution  of  that  very  important  class  of  collective  actions  which 
affect  all  the  members  of  the  communities  in  which  they  exist  equally 
and  in  the  same  way.  For  other  classes  of  action,  in  respect  of  which 
men  fall  into  different  groups,  other  forms  of  association  are  needed, 
and  these  forms  of  association  are  no  less  sovereign  in  their  sphere 
than  the  State  in  its  sphere.  There  is  no  universal  Sovereign  in  the 
community,  because  the  individuals  who  compose  that  community 
cannot  be  fully  represented  by  any  form  of  association.  For  different 
purposes,  they  fall  into  different  groups,  and  only  in  the  action  and 
inter-action  of  these  groups  does  Sovereignty  exist.  Even  so,  it  is 

[i64] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

an  incomplete  Sovereignty ;  for  all  the  groups  which  together  make  up 
Society,  are  imperfectly  representative  of  that  General  Will  which 
resides  in  the  community  alone." 

This  articulates  with  special  clearness  and  fulness 
what  all  progressive  people,  revolting  against  the  hor- 
rors of  Prussian  monism  (which  we  now  see  to  be  the 
conviction  of  many  besides  Prussians),  feel  today  with 
an  unconquerable  wistfulness.  And  we  should  not  stint 
at  this  crucial  point  our  citation  of  men  who  are  think- 
ing this  thing  through.  Nobody  that  I  have  read  has 
thought  it  through  with  a  finer  sense  of  proletarian  im- 
plications and  a  sturdier  sense  of  all  the  implications 
that  are  just  now  accessible  than  Mr.  Harold  J.  Laski. 

"We  are  urging,"  writes  Mr.  Laski,  "that  because  a  group  or  an 
individual  is  related  to  some  other  group  or  individual  it  is  not 
thereby  forced  to  enter  into  relations  with  every  other  part  of  the 
body  politic.  When  a  trade-union  ejects  one  of  its  members  for  re- 
fusing to  pay  a  political  levy  it  is  not  thereby  bringing  itself  into  re- 
lations with  the  Mormon  Church.  A  trade-union  as  such  has  no 
connection  with  the  Mormon  Church;  it  stands  self-sufficient  on  its 
own  legs.  It  may  work  with  the  State,  but  it  need  not  do  so  of 
necessity.  It  may  be  in  relations  with  the  State,  but  it  is  one  with  it 
and  not  of  it.  The  State,  to  use  James's  terms  ...  is  'distribu- 
tive' and  not  'collective.'  There  are  no  essential  connections.  .  .  . 

"If  we  become  inductive-minded  and  make  our  principles  grow  out 
of  the  facts  of  social  life  we  shall  admit  that  the  sanction  of  the  will 
of  the  State  is  going  to  depend  largely  on  the  persons  who  interpret 
it.  The  monarchs  of  the  ancien  regime  were  legally  the  sovereign 
power  in  France,  but  their  will  was  not  the  will  of  the  State.  It 

[165] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

did  not  prevail  because  of  the  supreme  unwisdom  of  the  manner  in 
which  they  chose  to  assume  that  their  good  was  also  the  popular  good. 
They  confused  what  Rousseau  would  have  called  their  'private  good' 
with  the  'common  good'  and  Louis  XVI  paid  the  penalty  on  the 
scaffold.  The  will  of  the  State  obtains  pre-eminence  over  the  wills  of 
other  groups  exactly  to  the  point  where  it  is  interpreted  with  sufficient 
wisdom  to  obtain  acceptance,  and  no  further.  It  is  a  will  to  some  ex- 
tent competing  with  other  wills,  and,  Darwin-wise,  surviving  only  by 
its  ability  to  cope  with  its  environment.  Should  it  venture  into  dan- 
gerous places  it  pays  the  penalty  of  its  audacity.  It  finds  its  sovereign- 
ty by  consent  transformed  into  impotence  by  disagreement. 

"But,  it  may  be  objected,  in  such  a  view  sovereignty  means  no 
more  than  the  ability  to  secure  assent.  I  can  only  reply  to  the  objec- 
tions by  admitting  it.  There  is  no  sanction  for  law  other  than  the 
consent  of  the  human  mind.  It  is  sheer  illusion  to  imagine  that  the 
authority  of  the  State  has  any  other  safeguard  than  the  wills  of  its 
members.  For  the  State,  as  I  have  tried  to  show,  is  simply  what  Mr. 
Graham  Wallas  calls  a  will-organization,  and  the  essential  feature  of 
such  a  thing  is  its  ultimate  dependence  upon  the  constituent  wills  from 
which  the  group  will  is  made.  To  argue  that  the  State  is  degraded 
by  such  reduction  in  nowise  alters,  so  far  as  I  can  see,  the  fact  that 
this  is  its  essential  nature.  We  have  only  to  look  at  the  realities  of 
social  existence  to  see  quite  clearly  that  the  State  does  not  enjoy 
any  preeminence  for  its  demands.  I  shall  find  again  and  again  that 
my  allegiance  is  divided  between  the  different  groups  to  which  I 
belong.  It  is  the  nature  of  the  particular  difficulty  which  decides  my 
action. 

"There  are,  in  this  view,  things  which  the  State  cannot  demand 
from  its  members.  It  could  not,  for  instance,  demand  from  one  of 
them  that  he  assassinate  a  perfectly  blameless  man ;  for  so  to  demand 
is  to  violate  for  both  men  the  whole  purpose  for  which  the  State  ex- 

[166] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

ists.  It  would  have,  on  the  other  hand,  a  clear  right  to  ask  from 
each  member  such  contribution  as  he  can  afford  to  a  system  of  national 
education,  because  the  modern  State  has  decided  that  the  more 
educated  are  its  members  the  more  are  they  likely  to  fulfill  its  end. 
What  I  mean  by  'right'  is  something  which  the  pragmatist  will  under- 
stand. It  is  something  the  individual  ought  to  concede,  because  ex- 
perience has  proved  it  to  be  good.  So  when  the  State  demands  from 
one  of  its  members  toleration  for  the  religious  belief  of  another  as  a 
right  each  should  enjoy,  it  means  that  the  consequences  of  toleration 
are  more  coincident  with  the  end  of  the  State  than  the  consequences 
of  religious  persecution.  Our  rights  are  teleological.  They  have  to 
prove  themselves.  That  is  why,  I  confess,  one  of  the  main  comforts 
I  derive  from  the  study  of  Aristotle  is  the  conviction  that  he  at- 
tempted to  delineate  a  pragmatist  theory  of  the  State.  He  gave  to  his 
rights  the  rich  validation  of  experience;  and  surely  a  right  that  has 
no  consequences  is  too  empty  to  admit  of  worth. 

"The  view  of  the  State  I  am  endeavoring  to  depict  may,  perhaps, 
be  best  understood  by  reference  to  a  chemical  analogy.  The  chemist 
draws  a  picture  of  his  molecule — it  is  a  number  of  atoms  grouped  to- 
gether by  certain  links  of  attraction  each  possesses  for  the  other.  And 
when  a  molecule  of  say  hydrogen  meets  a  molecule  of  oxygen  some- 
thing new  results.  What  is  there  may  be  merely  hydrogen  plus 
oxygen;  but  you  must  treat  it  as  something  different  from  either. 
So  I  would  urge  that  you  must  place  your  individual  at  the  centre 
of  things.  You  must  regard  him  as  linked  to  a  variety  of  associa- 
tions to  which  his  personality  attracts  him.  You  must  on  this  view 
admit  that  the  State  is  only  one  of  the  associations  to  which  he  hap- 
pens to  belong,  and  give  it  exactly  that  pre-eminence — and  no  more — 
to  which  on  the  particular  occasion  of  conflict,  its  possibly  superior 
moral  claim  will  entitle  it.  In  my  view  it  does  not  attempt  to  take 
that  pre-eminence  by  force !  it  wins  by  consent. 

['167'] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

"Surely,  too,  that  State  will  be  the  stronger  which  thus  binds  itself 
to  its  members  by  the  strength  of  a  moral  purpose  validated. 
When,  for  example,  your  miners  in  South  Wales  go  on  strike,  rather 
than  attempt  their  compulsion  by  Munitions  Acts  to  obey  that  for 
which  they  feel  no  sympathy,  and  thus  to  produce  that  feeling  of 
balked  disposition  of  which  Mr.  Graham  Wallas  has  written  so 
wisely,  you  seek  means  of  finding  common  ground  between  their 
group  and  yours,  you  will  have  done  better.  Is  there  not  a  tre- 
mendous danger  in  modern  times  that  people  will  believe  the  legal 
sovereignty  of  a  State  to  be  identical  with  its  moral  sovereignty? 
Right  is  a  dangerous  word — for  it  is  political  no  less  than  ethical, 
and  in  the  hands  of  a  skilful  statesman  the  meaning  may  be  in- 
sensibly fused.  So  it  will  be  preached  eventually  that  where  a  State, 
from  this  theoretic  conception  of  Oneness,  has  a  legal  right,  it  has 
also  a  moral  right,  which  passes  so  easily  into  a  moral  obligation. 
Government,  then,  stands  above  the  moral  code  applied  to  humbler 
individuals.  It  is  almost  unconsciously  exalted  into  tyranny.  It 
gains  the  power  to  crush  out  all  that  conflicts  with  its  own  will,  no 
matter  what  the  ethical  implications  of  that  will.  I  can  then  well 
understand  why  to  an  historian  like  Treitschke  power  can  be  the  end 
of  all  things.  For  then  power  is  moral  and  becomes  more  profoundly 
moral  as  it  grows  in  extent.  Is  there  the  slightest  justification  for 
such  a  conclusion? 


"In  the  realm  of  philosophy,  the  last  forty  years  have  seen  the  con- 
stant disruption  of  absolutisms.  In  the  sphere  of  politics  they  are 
assuredly  but  the  expression  of  what  our  rulers  are  fain  to  believe 
from  half-instinctive  desire.  The  history  of  recorded  experience 
seems  to  show  that  this  kind  of  dogma  is  the  stumbling-block  in  the 
way  of  all  progress.  The  State  has  sovereign  rights;  and  those  who 
manipulate  it  will  often  cause  it  to  be  used  for  the  protection  of  exist- 

[168] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

ing  rights.     The  two  get  identified;  the  dead  hand  of  effete  ances- 
tralism  falls  with  a  resounding  thud  on  the  living  hopes  of  today. 

"Such  difficulties  as  this  the  pluralistic  theory  of  the  State  seems 
to  me  to  remove.  As  a  theory  it  is  what  Professor  Dewey  calls  "con- 
sistently experimentalist,"  in  form  and  content.  It  denies  the  right- 
ness  of  force.  It  dissolves — what  the  facts  themselves  dissolve — the 
inherent  claim  of  the  State  to  obedience.  It  insists  that  the  State,  like 
every  other  association,  shall  prove  itself  by  what  it  achieves. 

"I  am  well  enough  aware  that  in  any  such  voluntarism  as  this  room 
is  left  for  a  hint  of  anarchy.  To  discredit  the  State  seems  like  enough 
to  dethroning  it.  And  when  the  voice  of  the  State  is  viewed  as  the 
deliberate  expression  of  public  opinion  it  seems  like  the  destruction 
of  the  one  uniquely  democratic  basis  we  have  thus  far  attained.  But 
the  objection,  like  the  play  queen  in  'Hamlet,'  protests  too  much.  It 
assumes  the  homogeneity  of  public  opinion,  and  of  that  homogeneity 
not  even  the  most  stout-hearted  of  us  could  adduce  the  proof.  Nor 
is  its  absence  defect.  On  the  contrary,  it  seems  to  me  that  it  is  es- 
sentially a  sign  that  real  thought  is  present.  A  community  that  can- 
not agree  is  already  a  community  capable  of  advance. 

"It  is  from  the  selection  of  variations,  not  from  the  preservation 
of  uniformities,  that  progress  is  born.  We  do  not  want  to  make  our 
State  a  cattle-yard  in  which  only  the  shepherd  will  know  one  beast 
from  another.  Rather  we  may  hope  to  bring  from  the  souls  of  men 
and  women  their  richest  fruition.  If  they  have  intelligence  we  shall 
ask  its  application  to  our  problems.  If  they  have  courage  we  shall 
ask  the  aid  of  its  compelling  will.  We  shall  make  the  basis  of  our 
State  consent  to  disagreement.  Therein  shall  we  ensure  its  deepest 
harmony." 

At  a  time  when  mob-sentiment  oscillates  between  the 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

paranoidal  anarchy  of  laissez-faire  and  its  new  born 
antitheses  and  successors,  monistic  state-capitalism  and 
state-socialism,  it  is  not  easy  to  grasp  the  economic  and 
political  philosophy  of  the  future  without  contaminat- 
ing it  with  vestigial  principles  from  the  competitive 
individualism  of  Manchester  economics,  the  romantic 
law-breaking  of  Bakounin,  the  aberrations  of  contem- 
porary profiteers  and  parochial  craft-unionists,  and  the 
mechanistic  fears  and  obsessions  of  new  bureaucracies. 
We  reel  between  the  equally  hateful  extremes  of  Prus- 
sianism  and  that  arrogant  type  of  individualism  which 
is  competitive,  paranoidal.  But  Mr.  Hobson  and  Mr. 
Orage  can  show  us  in  some  detail  how  we  may  make 
our  transition  with  due  respect  for  external  reality  and 
due  reverence  for  the  autonomy  in  the  soul  of  each  in- 
dividual. And  the  paragraphs  which  we  quote  from 
them  formulate  a  practical  program  the  first  planks 
of  which  are  already  being  worked  gropingly  into  prac- 
tice by  shop-stewards  in  England,  by  Amalgamated 
Clothing  Workers  and  Seattle  and  Winnipeg  strikers  in 
America. 

"There  is  no  mystery  attaching  to  the  organization  of  the  Guild. 
It  means  the  regimentation  into  a  single  fellowship  of  all  those  who 
are  employed  in  any  given  industry.  This  does  not  preclude  what- 
ever subdivisions  may  be  convenient  in  the  special  trades  belonging 
to  the  main  industry.  Thus  the  iron  and  steel  industry  may  comprise 
fourteen  or  fifteen  subdivisions,  but  all  living  integral  parts  of  the 
parent  Guild.  The  active  principle  of  the  Guild  is  industrial  de- 

[  170] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

mocracy.  Herein  it  differs  from  State  Socialism  or  Collectivism. 
In  the  one  case  control  comes  from  without  and  is  essentially  bureau- 
cratic; in  the  other,  the  Guild  manages  its  own  affairs,  appoints  its 
own  officers  from  the  general  manager  to  the  office  boy,  and  deals 
with  the  other  Guilds  and  with  the  State  as  a  self-contained  unit. 
It  rejects  State  bureaucracy;  but,  on  the  other  hand,  it  rejects 
Syndicalism,  because  it  accepts  co-management  with  the  State,  al- 
ways, however,  subject  to  the  principle  of  industrial  democracy. 
Co-management  must  not  be  held  to  imply  the  right  of  any  outside 
body  to  interfere  in  the  detailed  administration  of  the  Guild;  but  it 
rightly  implies  formal  and  effective  co-operation  with  the  State  in 
regard  to  large  policy,  for  the  simple  reason  that  the  policy  of  a 
Guild  is  a  public  matter,  about  which  the  public,  as  represented  by 
the  State,  has  an  indefeasible  right  to  be  consulted  and  considered. 
It  is  not  easy  to  understand  precisely  how  far  the  Syndicalist  disre- 
gards the  State,  as  such ;  nor  is  it  necessary  to  our  task  that  we  should 
make  any  such  inquiry.  For  ourselves  we  are  clear  that  the  Guilds 
ought  not  and  must  not  be  the  absolute  possessors  of  their  land, 
houses,  and  machinery.  We  remain  Socialists  because  we  believe  that 
in  the  final  analysis  the  State,  as  representing  the  community  at  large, 
must  be  the  final  arbiter. 

"But  the  recognition  of  State  organization  and  State  functions  does 
not  invalidate  our  main  contention  that  economics  must  precede  poli- 
tics. On  the  contrary,  it  strengthens  it.  The  difficulty  with  modern 
statesmanship  is  that  it  has  to  spend  its  strength  on  ways  and  means 
when  it  ought  to  be  doing  a  far  greater  work.  It  is  like  a  scientist  or 
an  artist  who  is  perpetually  distracted  from  his  real  work  by  domestic 
worries.  Remove  from  statesmanship  the  incubus  of  financial  puzzle- 
dom  and  it  may  achieve  glory  in  the  things  that  matter.  And  in  all 
human  probability  a  finer  type  of  politician  will  be  called  into  ac- 
tivity. Financial  considerations  corrode  politics  as  effectively  as  they 

[171] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

do  the  individual  worker.  Now  if  the  Guilds  are  in  economic  com- 
mand, if,  further,  their  labors  exceed  in  results  the  present  wage 
system,  it  follows  that  they  will  not  be  miserly  in  devoting  all  the 
money  that  is  required  for  the  cultural  development  of  the  com- 
munity.   

"it  will  be  for  the  Guilds  to  decide,  by  democratic  suffrage,  what 
hours  shall  be  worked  and  generally  the  conditions  of  employment. 
All  that  mass  of  existing  legislation  imposing  factory  regulations,  or 
relating  to  mining  conditions,  to  the  limitation  of  the  hours  of  work 
(legislation  which  we  have  previously  described  as  sumptuary),  will 
go  by  the  board.  The  Guilds  will  rightly  consider  their  own  conven- 
ience and  necessities.  It  may  be  discovered,  for  example,  that  times 
and  conditions  suitable  to  the  Engineering  Guild  will  not  suit  the 
Agricultural  Guild.  Legislation  attempted  from  the  outside  would 
in  such  an  organization  be  regarded  as  impertinent.  Even  the  exist- 
ing old  age  pensions  would  be  laughed  to  scorn  as  hopelessly  inade- 
quate. 

"There  can  be  no  doubt  that  the  old  tendency  inside  the  existing 
wage  system  is  to  level  wages.  The  old  distinction  between  the 
skilled  and  unskilled  is  rapidly  being  dissipated,  both  by  the  develop- 
ment of  machinery  and  the  economic  pressure  exerted  by  foreign  com- 
petition, and  the  increased  price  of  money.  With  this  tendency  we 
have  no  quarrel;  on  the  contrary,  we  welcome  it.  But  this  wage 
approximation  has  as  yet  hardly  touched  the  rent  of  ability  still  more 
or  less  willingly  paid  to  those  in  the  upper  reaches  of  the  administra- 
tive hierarchy.  That  they  will  finally  find  their  true  economic 
level  is  certain.  Meanwhile  their  services  are  rightly  in  demand  and 
their  remuneration  is  assured.  Even  if  the  process  of  wage  approxi- 
mation goes  much  further  than  we  now  foresee,  it  is  nevertheless  in- 
evitable that  the  graduations  of  position  and  pay  will  be  found  neces- 
sary to  efficient  Guild  administration.  We  do  not  shrink  from  grad- 

[172] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

uated  pay;  we  are  not  certain  that  it  is  not  desirable.  There  will 
be  no  inequitable  distribution  of  Guild  resources,  we  may  rest  as- 
sured; democratically  controlled  organizations  seldom  err  on  the  side 
of  generosity.  But  experience  will  speedily  teach  the  Guilds  that 
they  must  encourage  technical  skill  by  freely  offering  whatever  in- 
ducements may  at  the  time  most  powerfully  attract  competent  men. 
There  are  many' ways  by  which  invention,  organizing  capacity,  statis- 
tical aptitude  or  what  not  may  be  suitably  rewarded.  It  is  certain 
that  rewarded  these  qualities  must  be. 

"It  is  the  maintenance  and  protection  of  the  Guild  members  that 
really  constitutes  the  social  revolution  now  rendered  urgent  by  the 
failure  of  the  present  industrial  system  to  maintain  and  protect  its 
wage  slaves.  Here,  then,  we  reach  the  practical  issue  of  the  abolition 
of  the  wage  system.  The  fundamental  distinction  between  Guild 
control  and  private  capitalism  is  that,  whereas  the  latter  merely  buys 
labor  power  as  a  commodity,  and  at  a  price  (known  as  wages)  which 
yield  the  maximum  rent  and  interest,  the  Guilds  co-operatively  apply 
the  human  energy  of  their  members  independent  of  capitalist  charges, 
and  distribute  the  proceeds  of  their  members'  labor  among  their  mem- 
bers without  regard  to  rent  or  interest.  Competitive  wages,  in  fact, 
are  abolished  and  in  consequence,  there  is  no  surplus  value,  no  rent; 
no  wages,  no  interest ;  no  wages,  no  profits. 

"Once  a  member  of  his  Guild,  no  man  need  again  fear  the  rigors 
of  unemployment  or  the  slow  starvation  of  competitive  wage.  Thus 
every  transport  worker,  providing  he  honestly  completes  the  task 
assigned  him,  will  be  entitled  to  maintenance — a  maintenance  equal 
to  his  present  wage,  plus  the  amount  now  lost  by  unemployment, 
plus  a  proportion  of  existing  surplus  value — that  is,  plus  his  present 
individual  contribution  to  rent  and  interest;  and,  finally,  plus  what- 
ever savings  are  effected  by  more  efficient  organization.  He  will  not, 
therefore,  receive  wages  (as  we  now  know  them),  because  he  will  re- 

[  173] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

ceive  something  much  greater — possibly   three   times  greater — than 
the  existing  wage  standard. 

"We  pin  our  faith  to  the  democratic  idea  without  reserve.  We 
believe  that  the  workman  is  the  shrewdest  judge  of  good  work  and  of 
the  competent  manager.  Undistracted  by  irrelevant  political  notions, 
his  mind  centred  upon  the  practical  affairs  of  his  trade,  the  workman 
may  be  trusted  to  elect  to  higher  grades  the  best  men  available.  In 
the  appointment  of  their  checkweighmen,  for  example,  the  miners 
almost  never  make  a  mistake.  Doubtless  injustices  will  from  time 
to  time  be  perpetrated;  but  they  will  be  few  compared  with  the 
million  injustices  done  today  to  capable  men  who  are  habitually 
ignored  in  the  interests  of  capitalist  cadets. 

"We  differentiated  ourselves  from  the  Syndicalist  by  admitting  the 
right  of  the  State  to  co-management  with  the  Guilds.  In  the  most 
formal  manner,  now,  we  assert  that  the  material  of  all  the  Guilds 
ought  to  be  vested  in  the  State;  the  monopoly  of  the  Guilds  is  their 
organised  labour  power.  Over  their  labour  power  the  Guilds  must 
have  complete  control;  but  the  State  will  be  rightly  and  equitably 
entitled  to  a  substitute  for  economic  rent.  A  substitute,  we  say;  not 
economic  rent  itself;  for  economic  rent  is  a  product  of  competitive 
private  ownership.  Adam  Smith  was  the  first  to  point  out,  and  Tho- 
rold  Rogers  the  first  to  prove,  that  rent  was  originally  what  we  con- 
ceive it  will  be  again  under  Guild  Socialism,  namely,  a  tax  in  return 
for  a  charter  or  licence.  It  was  only  when  capitalism  arose  that  the 
tax  called  rent  was  raised  by  successive  stages  to  the  competitive 
rack-rent  it  is  to-day.  But  how  will  the  tax  payable  by  the  Guilds 
to  the  State  be  computed  if  not  by  competition?  By  the  needs  of 
the  State  and  the  proportionate  means  of  the  Guilds.  Assume  that 
the  estimated  budget  for  any  following  year  is  £250,000,000.  This 
sum  will  require  to  be  found  by  the  citizens  in  their  individual  or  in 

[174] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

their  collective  capacity.  But  for  those  individuals  who  are  organised 
in  Guilds,  it  will,  we  imagine,  be  most  convenient  to  tax  them  collec- 
tively, that  is,  through  their  Guilds.  Thus  the  Guild  would,  in  each 
instance,  be  required  to  levy  on  itself  in  behalf  of  the  State  an  amount 
proportionate  to  the  numbers  of  its  members. 

"We  do  not  deny  that  in  mass  production  or  distribution  there  is 
an  ever-present  danger  that  the  individual  may  pass  into  the  machine 
a  unique  individuality  and  come  out  at  the  other  end  a  mere  type. 
But  that,  after  all,  is  not  the  least  of  the  criticisms  that  apply  to 
the  existing  industrial  system.  There  is  practically  no  culture  of 
industrial  genius  under  private  capitalism — certainly  there  is  no  sys- 
tematic culture.  Given  ten  distinctive  individualities,  without  means 
or  influence,  how  many  will  live  to  enjoy  the  full  fruition  of  their 
faculties  ?  If  only  one  of  them  'arrives'  it  is  remarkable ;  yet  the  pri- 
vate capitalist  is  quick  to  exploit  him:  'See,'  he  says,  'how,  under 
our  glorious  industrial  system,  real  ability  rises  to  the  surface.'  But 
meagre  though  the  harvest  of  genius  or  special  talent  undoubtedly  is, 
there  is  this  also  to  be  remembered  that  probably  the  nine  men  who 
never  arrived  were  spiritually  and  morally  the  superiors  of  the  suc- 
cessful tenth.  How  often,  for  example,  do  we  hear  it  said  of  some- 
body: 'He's  a  remarkably  able  man,  but  much  too  modest — no  push, 
you  know.'  By  'push,'  in  this  instance,  is  meant  the  capacity  to  ex- 
ploit one's  fellowmen.  Or,  again,  how  often  do  we  hear  it  said  of 
the  successful  man:  'Yes,  he's  clever  enough,  but  absolutely  without 
scruple.'  Or,  yet  again:  'He  knows  how  to  get  the  most  out  of  bet- 
ter men  than  himself.'  Or,  'He  was  cute  enough  to  surround  him- 
self with  clever  young  lieutenants.'  It  is  not  necessary  to  labour 
the  point,  which,  briefly  summarised,  may  thus  be  stated:  Private 
capitalism  limits  the  individual  interests  and,  therefore,  necessarily 
crushes  all  those  faculties  of  mankind  that  do  not  definitely  minister  to 
those  limited  interests.  Here  we  come  upon  one  of  the  fundamental 

[175] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

laws  of  democracy.  No  system  can  be  truly  democratic  unless  it  calls 
into  activity  the  full  maximum  number  of  faculties  inherent  in  the 
democracy. 


"The  problem,  then,  of  the  modern  State  is  to  give  free  play  in 
their  appropriate  environment  to  the  economic  and  the  political  forces 
respectively.  We  have  seen  that  they  do  not  coalesce;  that  where 
they  are  intermixed,  they  not  only  tend  to  nullify  each  other,  but  to 
adulterate  those  finer  passions  and  ambitions  of  mankind  that  ought 
properly  to  find  expression  and  satisfaction  in  the  political  sphere.  It 
is  a  quality  inherent  in  private  capitalism  to  dominate  and  mould 
State  policy  to  its  own  ends,  precisely  as  it  exploits  labour.  If  the 
interests  of  private  capitalism  were  synonymous  with  those  of  the 
community  as  a  whole  this  danger  might  be  theoretical  rather  than 
real.  But  we  know  that  the  assumption  of  unity  of  interest  between 
private  capitalism  and  the  State  degrades  the  standard  of  national  life 
and  stifles  all  aspirations  towards  that  spiritual  influence  which  is  the 
true  mark  of  national  greatness.  But,  whilst  the  separation  of  the 
political  and  economic  functions  gives  equipoise  and  stability  to  the 
State,  nevertheless  the  policy  and  destiny  of  the  State,  in  the  final 
analysis,  depend  upon  its  economic  processes  being  healthy  and  equit- 
able. For  this  reason  amongst  others,  the  State,  acting  in  the  inter- 
ests of  citizenship  as  distinct  from  Guild  membership,  must  be  ade- 
quately represented  upon  the  governing  bodies  of  the  Guilds." 

But  sometimes  the  guild  socialists  slip  over  on  rather 
equivocal  ground.  Mr.  Hobson  and  Mr.  Orage,  in 
their  eagerness  to  bring  economic  responsibility  and 
power  within  their  national  guilds  and  thus  to  emanci- 
pate the  State  for  more  spiritual  activities,  surrender 
spiritual  activities  somewhat  too  readily  and  too  largely 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 


to  the  State.  They  are  prepared,  for  instance,  after 
insisting  that  the  guilds  have  charge  of  technical  edu- 
cation, to  surrender  all  studies  which  make  for  "cul- 
ture" to  the  organizing  genius  of  the  State.  In  the  light 
of  the  terrible  servitude  of  the  education  of  "culture" 
today  is  this  dealing  quite  wisely  with  unborn  genera- 
tions even  though  we  confidently  prophecy  the  extinc- 
tion of  the  perverse  moods  of  the  profiteer?  Another 
guildsman  or  associate  of  the  guildsmen,  Senor  Ramiro 
de  Maeztu,  is  so  eager  to  impale  the  defects  of  the 
older  democratic  idolatry  of  rights  along  with  our 
recent  reaction  towards  authoritarianism  that  he  be- 
comes extremely  anti-voluntaristic.  Like  some  of  the 
more  extreme  "neo-realists"  he  comes  to  invest  a  divin- 
ity in  certain  abstract  principles  which  are  conceived 
to  subsist  independently  of  all  individual  minds  and 
which  may,  by  their  very  nature  so  conceived,  tempt  us 
only  too  easily  into  a  toleration  of  a  new  kind  of  des- 
potism, to  flee  the  King  Stork  of  the  "ego-centric  pre- 
dicament" only  to  fall  under  the  bidding  of  some  plau- 
sible new  version  of  King  Log's  "eternal  principles." 
These  men  would  do  well  to  listen  to  some  of  Mr. 
Laski's  warnings.  But  their  colleague,  Mr.  Cole,  is 
freer  from  their  more  dubious  tendencies. 

What  is  the  dilemma  that  confronts  the  guildsmen? 
This  dilemma,  producer  versus  consumer,  is  nothing 
but  the  conflict  between  what  Mr.  Bertrand  Russell 

[177] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

would  call  impulses  and  desires  from  the  point  of  view 
of  individual  psychology.  An  industrial,  central  Guild 
Congress,  representing  the  diverse  guilds  and  their  pro- 
ductive impulses  will  be  pitted  against  "the  great  ter- 
ritorial association  of  Parliament  representing  the  con- 
sumers and  their  geographical  idiosyncracies"  and 
their  desires.  Mr.  Cole's  analysis  of  this  balance  of 
power  is  more  satisfactory  than  that  of  any  other  guilds- 
man. 

"The  system  of  National  Guilds  appeals  to  me  first  of  all  as  a  bal- 
ance of  powers.  Guildsmen  have  always  recognised,  and  drawn  a 
distinction  between,  two  forms  of  social  power,  economic  and  politi- 
cal. Economic  power,  as  they  hold,  precedes  political  power.  The 
social  class  which  at  any  time  holds  the  economic  power  will  hold  the 
political  power  also,  and  will  be  dispossessed  in  the  political  sphere 
only  by  a  new  class  which  is  able  to  overthrow  it  in  the  economic 
sphere. 

"The  first  question  which  National  Guildsmen  have  to  face,  in 
adopting  this  position,  and,  at  the  same  time,  holding  to  their  double 
theory  of  social  organisation,  is  whether  the  very  nature  of  the  dis- 
tinction which  they  draw  between  economic  and  political  power  does 
not  result  in  obliterating  the  difference  between  them.  This  is  the 
fundamental  character  of  the  criticism  urged  against  them  by  Syndi- 
calists and  Marxian  Industrial  unionists.  'You  agree  with  us,'  such 
critics  will  say,  'that  the  State  is  only  a  pale  reflexion  of  the  economic 
structure  of  Society.  Why,  then,  seek  to  preserve  this  mere  mechani- 
cal device  of  capitalism  when  the  conditions  which  created  it  have 
ceased  to  exist?' 

"It  is  not  enough  for  Guildsmen,  or,  at  least,  it  does  not  seem  to 
be  enough,  to  reply  that  reflexions  may  have  their  uses,  and  that,  if 

[178] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

capitalistic  industrialism  has  turned  the  State  to  its  own  ends,  demo- 
cratic industrialism,  in  the  day  of  its  triumph,  may  with  good  effect 
do  the  same.  This  is  an  answer,  and  perhaps  a  sufficient  answer; 
but  it  is  not,  I  am  convinced,  the  right  answer  for  Guildsmen  to 
make.  For  I  am  not  convinced  that  the  State  must  be,  under  all  so- 
cial conditions,  merely  a  pale  reflexion  of  the  economic  structure  of 
Society — at  least,  in  any  sense  which  would  preclude  equality  of 
power  between  them  on  many  issues. 

"In  countries  given  over  to  capitalist  industrialism,  the  State  is  con- 
trolled by  the  industrial  capitalists.  That  is  a  true  description  of 
things  as  they  are,  and  it  is  clear  that  things  can  be  changed  only  by 
means  of  a  re-distribution  of  economic  power.  But,  when  this  re-dis- 
tribution has  taken  place  and  National  Guilds  are  in  being,  will  it  still 
be  true  that  economic  power  precedes  political  power? 

"In  our  interpretation  of  history,  the  evolution  of  Society  is  seen  as 
a  long  series  of  struggles  between  social  classes  for  the  possession  of 
economic  power.  We  envisage  National  Guilds,  as  Marx  envisaged 
his  conception  of  Socialism,  as  the  culmination  of  this  long  process. 
We  do  not  doubt  that  development  will  continue  after  National 
Guilds  have  been  brought  into  being;  but  development  will  assume 
new  forms.  The  class-struggle  will  be  over,  and  the  'social  class' 
will  be  a  thing  of  the  past.  Under  these  new  conditions  will  the 
old  relation  between  economic  and  political  power  remain  unchanged  ? 
Is  it  not  rather  true  that  the  existing  relation  arises  out  of,  and  de- 
pends upon,  the  class-struggle,  so  that  with  the  ceasing  of  the  class- 
struggle  it,  too,  will  cease  to  exist?  The  contrast  between  economic 
and  political  power  has  only  a  strained  application  to  those  primitive 
conditions  which  preceded  an  acute  division  of  classes:  the  strain  will 
be  altogether  too  great  if  we  try  to  apply  it  to  conditions  in  which 
there  are  no  distinctions  of  class. 

"What,  then,  will  be  the  relation  between  economic  and  political 
power  under  the  Guilds?  A  relation,  I  think,  of  equality — equality 

[  179] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

upon  which  the  poise  and  vitality  of  Guild  Society  fundamentally 
depend.  For,  to  me  at  least,  the  balance  of  power  is  the  underlying 
principle  of  the  Guilds  and  any  departure  from  it  would  be  destruc- 
tive of  their  essential  character.  Let  me  explain  more  precisely  what 
I  mean. 

"We  have  disputed,  time  and  again,  about  the  Sovereignty  of 
the  State,  and  its  application  to  Guild  philosophy;  but  we  have  often 
conceived  the  problem  rather  in  a  negative  than  in  a  positive  way. 
Sometimes  we  have  started  with  Guilds  as  a  positive  system,  and 
have  tried  to  see  in  what  respects  we  desire  to  limit  their  authority  by 
State  intervention,  or  by  the  assigning  of  certain  functions  to  the 
State  rather  than  to  the  Guilds.  At  other  times,  we  have  started 
from  the  side  of  the  State,  and  considered  in  what  respects  we  desire 
to  see  its  power  limited  or  its  functions  curtailed.  What  we  have 
seldom  done  is  to  consider  at  the  same  time  the  positive  character  of 
both  the  State  and  the  Guilds,  so  as  to  focus  at  once  the  whole  prob- 
lem of  the  relation  between  them. 

"This,  however,  is  what  we  must  try  to  do  when  we  attempt,  not 
to  define  the  limits  of  State  or  Guild  action,  but  to  lay  bare  the  basic 
principle  of  National  Guilds.  The  fundamental  reason  for  the 
preservation,  in  a  democratic  Society,  of  both  the  industrial  and  the 
political  forms  of  social  organisation  is,  it  seems  to  me,  that  only  by 
dividing  the  vast  power  now  wielded  by  industrial  capitalism  can  the 
individual  hope  to  be  free.  The  objection  is  not  simply  to  the  con- 
centration of  so  vast  a  power  in  the  present  hands,  but  to  its  concen- 
tration anywhere  at  all.  If  the  individual  is  not  to  be  a  mere  pigmy 
in  the  hands  of  a  colossal  social  organism,  there  must  be  such  a  divi- 
sion of  social  powers  as  will  preserve  individual  freedom  by  balancing 
one  social  organism  so  nicely  against  another  that  the  individual  may 
still  count.  If  the  individual  is  not  to  be  merely  an  insignificant 
part  of  a  society  in  which  his  personality  is  absorbed,  Society  must 

[180] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

be  divided  in  such  a  way  as  to  make  the  individual  the  link  between 
its  autonomous  but  interdependent  parts." 

So  far  so  good.  Mr.  Cole  is  clearly  sufficiently  wor- 
ried about  a  premature  and  too  free-handed  division  of 
functions  that  will  lend  too  much  power  to  the  State- 
incubus  from  which  we  are  trying  to  escape  all  over 
western  civilization  by  internal  class-wars  and  external 
national  wars  or  imperialistic  coercions  conducted 
simultaneously.  Mr.  Cole  is  a  national  guildsman  be- 
cause national  guilds  seem  to  him  "to  offer  the  only 
reasonable  prospect  of  a  balance  of  powers."  He  calls 
himself  a  national  guildsman  "in  the  name  of  individ- 
ual freedom."  Perhaps  he  will  not,  then,  be  as  easy- 
handed  in  turning  over  education  for  culture  to  the 
new  State  as  Mr.  Hobson  and  Mr.  Orage.  He  will 
not  be  as  implacably  fearful  of  the  insistence  on  the 
"rights"  of  the  individual  as  Senor  Ramiro  de  Maeztu. 
He  will  not  anathematize  "desires"  as  magnificently 
and  as  morbidly  as  Mr.  Bertrand  Russell.  He  argues 
well  that  this  balance  of  powers  which  he  so  wisely 
recognizes  as  fundamental  is  not  only  attainable  but 
maintainable  in  spite  of  lurking  dangers  in  the  future. 
And  yet  even  Mr.  Cole  can  hardly  be  altogether  reas- 
suring to  such  inveterate  pluralists  as  those  of  us  who 
have  been  bred  under  that  American  ideal  of  separa- 
tion of  political  powers  which  sprang  so  inductively 
from  the  drift  of  the  pre-revolutionary  colonies  and 

[181] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

which,  despite  the  occasional  usurpations  of  a  Hamil- 
tonian  Congress  or  President  or  Supreme  Court,  re- 
mains our  ideal.  Mr.  Cole  is  so  impressed  by  the  fact 
of  these  usurpations  that  he  denies  the  possibility  of  a 
separation  of  political  powers  in  the  State.  He  assu- 
ages his  longings  for  pluralism  in  his  picture  of  the 
guilds.  He  grants  to  the  State  a  monistic  character 
that  might,  at  the  last,  lure  us  into  traps  against  which 
Mr.  Hobson,  Mr.  Orage,  and  Sefior  de  Maeztu  have 
failed  to  provide.  Mr.  Cole  sees  that  "the  old  doctrine 
of  the  separation  of  powers  is  based  on  the  principle 
of  a  division  by  stages."  But  he  would  now  surrender 
these  psychological  and  logical  realities  for  a  "division 
by  function."  At  first  this  sounds  in  better  accord  with 
our  new  psychology  as  opposed  to  the  older,  more  arti- 
ficially analytical  psychology.  But  it  somewhat  slights 
what  Doctor  Meyer  calls  the  "ultrabiologic  level  of 
facts."  Economic  realities  have  crowded  out  Mr. 
Cole's  sense  of  some  of  the  more  sophisticated  psy- 
chological realities.  He  insists  that  "the  type,  purpose 
and  subject-matter  of  the  problem,  and  not  the  stage 
at  which  it  has  arrived,  must  determine  what  authority 
is  to  deal  with  it."  "Guild  theory  involves,"  he  con- 
cludes, "the  division  of  the  'legislative-executive  power' 
according  to  function  between  the  State  and  the  Guilds; 
but  it  preserves  the  integrity  of  the  judiciary,  making  it 
an  appendage  neither  of  the  State  nor  of  the  Guilds, 

[182] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

but  of  the  two  combined."  This  is  certainly  a  brilliant 
suggestion.  Yet  twentieth  century  Americans,  after 
their  bitter  experiences  with  our  Supreme  Court,  will 
wonder  whether,  even  after  a  guild- revolution  has  de- 
stroyed "privilege"  as  we  know  it  today,  a  judiciary, 
even  a  judiciary  which  is  but  "an  appendage"  and 
which  would  doubtless  be  subject  to  a  flexible  system 
of  recall,  would  not  be  a  terrible  check  to  the  unrm- 
agined  hopes  of  future  progressives,  whether  in  fact 
Mr.  Cole  is  quite  realizing  his  dream  of  "equality," 
of  "balancing  one  social  organism  so  nicely  against  an- 
other that  the  individual  may  still  count."  Once  more 
our  meditations,  so  constantly  likely  to  become  stere- 
otyped, need  the  leaven  of  those  benignant  nemeses  of 
all  inertia,  those  invincible  champions  of  our  dynamic 
birthright,  the  Utopian  anarchists. 

''Politics  and  economics,"  says  Mr.  Cole,  "afford  the 
only  possible  line  of  division."  May  not  this  too  read- 
ily become  a  new  version  of  those  dualisms  which  cre- 
ated a  world  of  spirit  and  a  world  of  matter,  a  world 
of  values  and  a  world  of  utilities,  a  world  of  leisure  and 
a  world  of  drudgery  against  which  we  have  been  argu- 
ing throughout  this  book?  The  guild  socialists  have 
given  us  the  most  coherent  scheme  yet  elaborated.  But 
some  of  us  are  still  inclined  to  pluralize  sovereignty 
yet  more  radically. 

All  through  this  book  we  have  emphasized  the  fact 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

that  religion,  criticism,  science,  and  art  are  not  wholly 
separable  subject-matters  but  are  flowing,  merging 
stages  in  the  thoughts  and  deeds  of  every  man.  The 
old  democratic  practice  in  America  and  the  old  theo- 
ries of  certain  French  philosophers  of  a  representative 
government  divided  by  stages,  legislative,  judiciary, 
and  executive,  seem  to  me  to  have  been  unconscious 
recognitions  of  this  psychological  truth.  As  all  men 
must  have  aspirations,  purify  them  into  critical  hypo- 
theses, theories,  laws,  and  execute  them  artistically  and 
scientifically,  so  the  State  must  formulate  aspirations, 
criticize  them  and  execute  them  as  accurately  and 
beautifully  as  possible.  All  individuals  experience  all 
these  stages  though  most  individuals  (perhaps  because 
of  the  malign  tendency  which  psychoanalysts  call  fixa- 
tion, a  tendency  which  we  may  progressively  lighten 
in  men)  specialize  in  one  stage,  grow  obsessed,  blinded 
by  complexes.  But  even  today,  despite  the  omnipres- 
ence of  the  neuroses  and  the  psychoses,  individuals  can- 
not and  do  not  quite  forget  those  stages  which  they 
happen  to  be  less  accustomed  to  perfect.  The  critic 
does  not  wholly  cease  to  be  poet  and  scientist.  Dar- 
win may  find  himself  bored  with  Shakespeare  but  he 
sometimes  grows  lyrical  as  he  searches  for  the  meaning 
of  the  emotion  in  the  features  of  animals  and  men. 
Doubtless  all  these  stages  will  always  need  specialists 
in  some  sense,  saner  specialists,  not  the  obsessed  crea- 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

tures  who  call  themselves  specialists  today.  Doubtless 
the  State  will  need  such  specialists.  But  the  interac- 
tion of  these  stages  in  the  State  as  in  the  individual 
would  be  more  intimate  and  free  if  people  became  more 
thoroughly  self-conscious  of  the  merging  of  these  ten- 
dencies in  the  minds  of  all  well-balanced  individuals 
whatever  their  specialties.  We  may  agree  with  guilds- 
men  that  a  nation  should  have  its  Guild  Congresses 
representing  us  as  producers  and  its  State  representing 
us  as  consumers,  two  organizations  free  to  carry  out 
their  several  functions  with  a  considerable  degree  of 
independence.  We  may  agree  with  the  guildsmen  that 
these  two  great  organizations  should  be  constantly  re- 
adjusting their  balance  of  power  through  a  "Joint  Com- 
mittee" which  should  have  delegates  from  both  Guild 
Congress  and  State,  which  should  listen  to  the  State's 
demand  for  revenue  from  the  property  operated  by  the 
guilds  for  the  State.  We  may  agree  that  the  Joint 
Committee  could  best  apportion  this  tax  among  the 
guilds  in  accordance  with  their  several  resources  and 
adjust  other  matters  of  friction  between  us  as  producers 
and  as  consumers.  But  I  believe  also  that  the  Guild 
Congress,  the  State,  and  the  Joint  Committee  should 
each  be  organized  pluralistically  into  their  legislative, 
judiciary,  and  executive  stages  or  aspects,  that  the 
Joint  Committee  should  be  composed  of  men  not  purely 
judicial,  hypothesis-making,  no  matter  how  judicial 

[  185  ] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

the  main  body  of  their  functions  might  prove  to  be,  but 
of  legislators,  judiciary  experts,  and  executors,  i.e.,  of 
religious  aspirers  or  dreamers,  critical  purifiers  of 
hypotheses,  and  artists  or  makers  or  scientific  experi- 
mentalists. 

IV 

I  have  been  trying  to  make  some  forecast  of  the 
processes  by  which  intellectuals  and  wage-workers  will 
unite  to  break-down  rationally  those  institutions  which 
are  but  hysterical  symptoms,  compromises,  bad  habit- 
formations  from  competitive  random  activities,  morbid 
complexes,  and  inertia.  With  the  evaporation  of  these 
evil,  false,  terribly  depressing  institutions  or  social  hab- 
its we  may  so  integrate  our  activities  as  to  get  a  much 
fuller  release  for  that  wish  to  love,  we  may  discover 
our  autonomy  and  seek  free  identification,  thus  express- 
ing what  we  believe  to  be  the  original  nature  of  man. 

Amidst  all  the  squalor  of  modern  industrialism  we 
find  this  sublime  miracle — that  the  wish  to  love  wells 
up  most  purely  from  the  folk,  from  the  wage-workers 
at  the  bottom.  And  the  intellectual  should  put  aside 
all  proud  hopes  of  leading,  for  the  humbler,  more  lov- 
ing task  of  giving  a  little  more  articulate  expression 
to  these  profound  proletarian  aspirations  just  as  the 
writer  of  symphonies  may  give  architectonic  coherence 
and  majesty  to  the  myriad  brooklike  songs  of  Hun- 
garian peasants. 

['86] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

For  our  observation  that  the  deepest  love,  less  re- 
pressed into  possessive  capitalism  and  sex,  wells 
from  the  proletariat  we  may  cite  the  authority  of  one  of 
the  greatest  anthropologists  of  the  world,  Professor 
Franz  Boas. 

"In  North  America,  among  the  Indians  of  British  Columbia,  in 
which  a  sharp  distinction  is  made  between  people  of  noble  birth  and 
common  people  .  .  .  the  contrast  between  the  social  proprieties  .  .  . 
is  very  striking.  Of  the  common  people  are  expected  humbleness, 
mercy,  and  all  those  qualities  that  we  consider  humane. 

"Similar  observations  may  be  made  in  all  those  cases  in  which,  by 
a  complex  tradition,  a  social  class  is  set  off  from  the  mass  of  the  peo- 
ple. The  chiefs  of  the  Polynesian  Islands,  the  kings  in  Africa,  the 
medicine  men  of  all  countries  present  examples  in  which  a  social 
group's  line  of  conduct  and  of  thought  is  strongly  modified  by  their 
segregation  from  the  mass  of  the  people.  On  the  whole,  in  socie- 
ties of  this  type,  the  mass  of  the  people  consider  as  their  ideal  those 
actions  which  we  should  characterize  as  humane;  not  by  any  means 
that  all  their  actions  conform  to  humane  conduct,  but  their  valua- 
tion of  men  shows  that  the  fundamental  altruistic  principles  which 
we  recognize  are  recognized  by  them  too.  Not  so  with  the  priv- 
ileged classes.  In  place  of  the  general  humane  interest  the  class  inter- 
est predominates;  and  while  it  would  be  wrong  to  say  that  their 
conduct  is  selfish,  it  is  always  so  shaped  that  the  interest  of  the  class 
to  which  they  belong  prevails  over  the  interest  of  society  as  a  whole. 
If  it  is  necessary  to  secure  rank  and  to  enhance  the  standing  of  the 
family  by  killing  a  number  of  enemies,  there  is  no  hesitation  felt  in 
taking  life.  If  the  interest  of  the  class  requires  that  its  members 
should  not  perform  menial  occupations  but  should  devote  themselves 
to  art  or  learning,  then  all  the  members  of  the  class  will  vie  with  one 

[187] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

another  in  the  attainment  of  these  achievements.  It  is  for  this  reason 
that  every  segregated  class  is  much  more  strongly  influenced  by  spe- 
cial traditional  ideas  than  is  the  mass  of  the  people ;  not  that  the  mul- 
titude is  free  to  think  rationally  and  that  its  behavior  is  not  deter- 
mined by  tradition,  but  that  the  tradition  is  not  so  specific,  not  so 
strictly  determined  in  its  range,  as  in  the  case  of  the  segregated  classes. 
For  this  reason  it  is  often  found  that  the  restriction  of  freedom  of 
thought  by  convention  is  greater  in  what  we  might  call  the  educated 
classes  than  in  the  mass  of  the  people. 

"It  is  therefore  not  surprising  that  the  masses  of  the  people — 
whose  attachment  to  the  past  is  comparatively  slight  and  who  work — 
respond  more  quickly  to  the  urgent  demands  of  the  hour  than  the 
educated  classes,  and  that  the  ethical  ideals  of  the  best  among  them 
are  human  ideals,  not  those  of  the  segregated  class.  For  this  reason 
I  should  always  be  more  inclined  to  accept,  in  regard  to  fundamental 
human  problems,  the  judgment  of  the  masses  rather  than  the  judg- 
ment of  the  intellectuals,  which  is  much  more  certain  to  be  warped  by 
unconscious  control  of  traditional  ideas.  I  do  not  mean  to  say  that 
the  judgment  of  the  masses  would  be  acceptable  in  regard  to  every 
problem  of  human  life,  because  there  are  many  which,  by  their  tech- 
nical nature,  are  beyond  their  understanding.  Nor  do  I  believe  that 
the  details  of  the  right  solution  of  a  problem  can  always  be  found 
by  the  masses;  but  I  feel  strongly  that  the  problem  itself,  as  viewed 
by  them,  and  the  ideal  that  they  want  to  see  realized,  is  a  safer  guide 
for  our  conduct  than  the  ideal  of  the  intellectual  group  that  stands 
under  the  ban  of  an  historical  tradition  that  dulls  their  feeling  for 
the  needs  of  the  day." 

Modern  psychology  has  revealed  to  us  the  chief  mo- 
tive that  corrupted  and  blinded  the  master  class  in 
the  early  periods  of  the  labor  movement  and  the  mas- 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

ter  class  today,  fear — fear  which  defeats,  in  excess, 
even  the  self-assertive  ends  of  the  master  himself,  fear 
which  represses  his  own  and  others'  deeper  wish  to 
love  and  create  only  to  pervert  such  impulses  (since 
they  cannot  be  crushed)  into  violence  and  sinister  sub- 
terfuge, fear  in  which  the  master,  hardly  knowing  the 
fever  in  his  own  conscience,  turns  almost  unconsciously 
from  the  saving  and  sympathetic  study  of  the  real  de- 
sires of  his  wage-slaves,  even  from  his  own  deeper  de- 
sires, from  the  facts  of  life  and  their  logical  implica- 
tions to  erect  for  himself  fantastic  cathedrals  of  illu- 
sion with  crazy  spires  and  dark,  blind  recesses  and  mon- 
strous gargoyles  like  those  which  a  superstitious  Ameri- 
can press  conjures  before  us  as  the  alleged  haunts  and 
idols  of  our  I.W.W.  or  of  the  Russian  Bolsheviki. 
Against  this  morbid  fear  which  has,  with  fluctuating 
degrees  of  intensity,  corrupted  the  majority  of  the 
"segregated  classes"  for  more  than  one  hundred  and 
fifty  years  how  could  a  sense  of  moral  autonomy 
struggle  into  being  in  the  minds  of  the  oppressed? 
How  can  it  endure  and  grow  today  even  under  the 
caprices,  now  insidious,  now  brutal,  with  which  the 
masters  strive  to  yoke  it?  The  miracle  has  neverthe- 
less happened,  happens,  and  will  happen. 

The  pseudo-legal  paranoia  of  the  English  "upper" 
classes,  reached  its  first  great  climax  in  the  Peterloo 
massacre.  It  is  worth  while  to  dwell  over  it  with  those 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

superb  historians,  the  Hammonds,  for  it  is  very  sim- 
ilar with  its  revelations  of  the  delusion  of  persecution 
and  the  mania  of  grandeur  on  the  masters'  side  along 
with  the  sublime,  and  stoical  non-resistance  on  the 
proletarian  side  to  a  long  series  of  episodes  which  have 
blotted  the  history  of  the  nineteenth  century  and  the 
first  decades  of  the  twentieth  in  every  highly  industrial- 
ized nation  in  the  world,  episodes  which  from  time  to 
time  are  more  frequent,  then  less  frequent,  but  from 
which  there  is  as  yet  little  promise  of  permanent  eman- 
cipation. 

"The  Lancashire  reformers  decided  to  hold  a  great  meeting  in  St. 
Peter's  Fields,  on  the  outskirts  of  Manchester.  The  magistrates  were 
uneasy  about  the  meeting,  for  popular  discontent,  inflamed  by  the 
recent  Corn  Law,  was  acute :  meetings  had  been  held  in  various  north- 
ern towns:  an  attempt  had  been  made  to  organise  a  boycott  of  ex- 
ciseable  goods,  drilling  had  been  going  on,  and  several  persons  had 
found  their  way  into  prison,  where  it  was  hoped  that  they  would 
learn  that  in  the  circumstances  of  contemporary  society  to  speak  the 
truth  or  anything  like  it  was  sedition.  But  though  the  magistrates 
disliked  the  meeting,  they  decided  only  a  few  hours  before  it  began 
that  it  could  not  be  regarded  as  illegal.  When  the  vast  throng  as- 
sembled, there  was  nothing  in  its  appearance  to  shake  the  opinion  of 
the  magistrates.  The  meeting  was  in  its  Sunday  clothes,  bands  were 
playing  'God  save  the  King,'  and  one  out  of  every  three  persons  was 
a  woman.  The  chief  orator  of  the  day,  Henry  Hunt,  a  brave,  vain, 
and  sincere  man,  had  a  taste  for  language  that  sounded  violent  and 
dangerous  to  the  authorities,  but  even  he  could  scarcely  lead  a  revolu- 
tion with  so  decorous  an  army.  Bamford,  the  leader  of  the  three 

[190] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

thousand  from  Middleton,  has  described  the  scene  when  his  contin- 
gent started;  how  he  addressed  them,  saying  that  sticks  were  only 
to  be  carried  by  the  old  and  infirm,  that  the  procession  was  to  march 
in  military  order,  that  the  reformers  were  determined,  by  taking  the 
most  elaborate  precautions  against  disturbance  or  confusion,  to  give 
the  lie  to  their  enemies  who  said  the  working  classes  were  a  rabble. 
The  Middleton  Reformers,  reinforced  by  another  three  thousand 
from  Rochdale,  set  out  on  their  slow  march  towards  Manchester;  a 
band  was  playing,  the  men  were  in  their  Sunday  shirts,  children 
were  in  the  ranks,  women  and  girls  at  their  head.  As  they  went 
their  army  was  swollen  by  new  contingents,  and  when  they  passed 
through  the  Irish  weavers'  quarter  they  were  received  with  an  en- 
thusiasm more  demonstrative  than  the  enthusiasm  of  Englishmen, 
expressing  itself  in  a  language  that  few  of  them  could  understand. 
When  all  the  contingents  had  poured  into  the  Fields,  the  meeting 
numbered  80,000  persons,  assembled  to  demand  universal  suffrage, 
vote  by  ballot,  annual  Parliaments,  and  the  repeal  of  the  Corn  Laws. 
The  town  they  met  in,  though  almost  the  largest  in  England,  was 
unrepresented  in  a  Parliament  that  gave  two  seats  to  Old  Sarum. 
Of  the  eighty  thousand,  the  vast  mass  were  voteless  men  and  women, 
whom  Parliament  had  handed  over  to  their  employers  by  the  Com- 
bination Laws,  while  it  had  taxed  their  food  for  the  benefit  of  the 
landowners  by  a  most  drastic  Corn  Law.  The  classes  that  controlled 
Parliament  and  their  lives  were  represented  by  the  magistrates,  who 
were  landlords  or  parsons,  and  by  the  yeomanry,  who  were  largely 
manufacturers.  Between  those  classes  must  be  shared  the  responsi- 
bility for  the  sudden  and  unprovoked  charge  on  a  defenceless  and 
unresisting  crowd,  for  if  the  magistrates  gave  the  orders,  the  yeomanry 
supplied  the  zeal.  Hunt  had  scarcely  begun  his  speech,  when  the 
yeomanry  cavalry  advanced  brandishing  their  swords.  Hunt  told 
the  reformers  to  cheer,  which  they  did ;  the  yeomanry  then  rode  into 
the  crowd,  which  gave  way  for  them,  and  arrested  Hunt.  But  that 

[191] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

was  not  enough  for  the  yeomanry,  who  cried,  'Have  at  their  flags,' 
and  began  striking  wildly  all  around  them.  The  magistrates  then 
ejave  the  order  to  charge.  In  ten  minutes  the  field  was  deserted 
except  for  the  dead  and  wounded,  and  banners,  hats,  shawls,  and 
bonnets:  the  strangest  debris  of  any  battlefield  since  the  madness  of 
Ajax.  Eleven  people  died,  two  of  them  were  women,  one  a  child,  and 
over  four  hundred  were  wounded,  one  hundred  and  thirteen  being 
women.  Of  the  wounded  more  than  a  quarter  were  wounded  by  the 
sword.  So  bitter  were  the  hatreds  and  suspicions  of  class,  that 
wounded  men  and  women  did  not  dare  to  apply  for  parish  relief,  or 
even  go  to  the  hospital  for  treatment,  for  fear  it  should  be  discovered 
that  they  had  received  their  wounds  at  Peterloo.  A  correspondent 
wrote  to  the  Home  Office  to  say  that  the  woman  from  Eccles  who 
had  been  killed  was  a  dangerous  character,  for  she  had  been  heard 
to  curse  the  curate.  The  magistrates,  hussars,  and  yeomanry  were 
thanked  by  the  Government;  Fitzwilliam  was  dismissed  from  his 
Lord  Lieutenancy  for  protesting  at  a  great  Yorkshire  meeting;  Hunt 
and  three  of  his  colleagues  were  sent  to  prison,  Hunt  for  two  years 
and  a  half,  the  others  for  a  year.  And  Hunt,  whose  arrest  was  the 
nominal  excuse  for  the  violent  onslaught,  had  actually  offered  to  sur- 
render himself  to  the  authorities  the  night  before." 

Out  of  all  this  horror  there  is  this  one  comfort  to 
be  gleaned  not  only  from  Peterloo  but  from  every  other 
capitalist  massacre  to  the  days  of  Ludlow  and  West 
Virginia — the  force  used  by  the  underdogs  is  more  hu- 
mane than  the  force  used  by  their  masters.  Modern 
proletarians  resemble  nothing  so  much  as  the  Christian 
martyrs  who  conquered  western  Europe  even  while  the 
lions  of  the  amphitheatre  tore  at  their  bowels.  You 
may  cite  instances  of  proletarian  aggression.  But  the 

[  192] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

heavier  burden  lies  on  the  other  shoulders.  You  may 
sneer  at  proletarian  non-resistance  as  but  the  dumb, 
sullen,  and  scared  reaction  of  savages  before  an  effi- 
cient civilization.  But  the  same  may  be  said  of  the 
Christian  martyrs  and  of  scientific  martyrs  like  Galileo. 
It  is  all  the  same  thing  except  that  with  the  proletarians 
it  is  on  the  largest  scale  yet  compassed.  In  Petrograd, 
before  such  huge  non-resistance,  czarism  crumbled. 
Doubtless  fear,  moroseness,  helplessness  do  play  their 
part  in  such  moods.  But  so  also,  we  have  ample  evi- 
dence, does  self-discipline,  the  only  discipline  worth 
the  name.  Self-discipline  is  the  phenomenon  which 
appears  at  Peterloo  and  swells  to  a  diapason  at  Petro- 
grad. By  conquering  themselves  first  the  proletarians 
conquer  the  world.  Just  so,  Mr.  A.  J.  Penty  tells  us  in 
his  articles  called  "A  Guildsman's  Interpretation  of 
History,"  the  early  Christians  were  not  otherworldly 
but  rather  renounced  the  world  temporarily  in  order 
that  they  might  conquer  it  or,  in  other  words,  turned 
from  the  centrifugal  and  less  essential  part  of  their  own 
natures  to  learn  that  deeper  centripetal  secret  of  their 
own  personalities  which  gave  them  their  beautiful  low- 
liness and  their  sublime  invincibility.  Today  a  prole- 
tarian mob  not  infrequently  rises  for  a  fleeting  moment 
very  near  to  that  stoical  fourth  level  of  conduct  which 
McDougall  celebrates  in  the  rare  individual.  Those 
moments  will  ere  long  extend  to  hours,  nay  to  days.  If 

[  193] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

there  is  awed  horror  there  is  also  the  flash  of  exaltation. 
"Everything  ideal  has  a  natural  origin  and  an  ideal 
development."  The  ideal  elements  grow.  They  are 
small  at  Peterloo,  great  on  the  Mesaba  Range  of  Min- 
nesota, greater  at  Petrograd. 

Many  of  the  most  tragic  retardations  of  the  con- 
science of  the  whole  English  people  may  be  traced  to 
these  attempts  to  check  the  growth  of  proletarian  auton- 
omy. Labor  organizations,  had  they  been  unfettered 
from  the  first,  would  have  carried  England  far  beyond 
the  point  she  has  reached  today  just  as  certain  labor 
organizations  in  America,  if  the  Steel  Trust  had  al- 
lowed them  to  live,  would  have  solved  a  good  deal  of 
our  most  crucial  Americanization  problem  and  made 
East  St.  Louis  riots  impossible.  To  check  the  labor 
organizations  of  early  nineteenth  century  England  was 
to  drive  proletarians  in  two  directions:  towards  vio- 
lence and  towards  the  noble  but  often  fantastic  utop- 
ianism  of  Robert  Owen.  Both  anarchistic  violence  and 
anarchistic  utopianism,  if  they  remain  untempered  by 
hard-headed  empiricism,  have  much  in  common.  Both 
arise,  psychologically,  out  of  desperation  as  (so  Royce 
has  shown)  a  new  religion  may  arise  out  of  extreme 
pessimism.  Both  rest,  logically,  on  the  presupposition 
that  human  nature  can  be  converted  suddenly.  Well, 
recent  evolutionary  speculation  has,  as  Teggart  has 
shown  us,  tended  rather  against  the  Lyell-Darwinian 

[  194] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

emphasis  on  gradual  change  and  compensation.  We 
now  realize,  as  Huxley  did,  that  while  some  changes 
are  gradual  there  are  also  some  which  are  abrupt.  Both 
Marxian  necessitarians  and  Utopian-anarchist  volun- 
tarists  can  find  striking  evidence  in  history  to  justify 
their  respective  tastes  for  gradualness  or  catastrophism. 
But  the  problem  of  that  more  sober  voluntarism  of  our 
hour,  that  of  William  James,  the  voluntarism  that 
would  reconcile  the  biology  of  Darwin  and  the  biology 
of  Bateson  and  would  reconcile  the  economics  of  Marx 
and  the  economics  of  Owen,  this  problem  suggests  the 
frank  recognition  both  of  changes  that  are  gradual 
and  changes  that  are  sudden,  of  understanding  both 
and  sublimating  them  by  drawing  from  our  own  great 
hidden  mental  energies  of  which  William  James  wrote 
in  his  multifarious  pioneering  and  for  which  psychoan- 
alysis now  furnishes  the  technique. 

To  turn  from  Francis  Place  to  a  contemporary  like 
Thorstein  Veblen  is  to  renew  one's  faith  in  at  least  the 
progress  of  the  pioneer  intellectuals.  To  compare  the 
romantic  catastrophism  of  English  labor  of  the  thirties 
with  the  realistic  gradualism  of  English  labor  of  the 
eighties  and  with  the  evolutionary  experimentalism  of 
English  labor  of  1919,  an  experimentalism  alert  for 
opportunities  both  for  gradual  and  for  sudden  change, 
all  this  is  tremendously  reassuring.  But  to  compare 
the  fear-poisoned  minds  of  the  employers  of  1830  with 

[195] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

the  almost  equally  complex-ridden  minds  of  the  Eng- 
lish and  American  employers  of  1919  is  to  discover  one 
of  those  inert  sections  of  society  of  which  Teggart  has 
also  reminded  us.  It  is  discouraging  confirmation  of 
Boas's  description  of  the  tradition-ridden,  cruel  segre- 
gated classes.  The  following  masterpiece  from  the 
Hammonds,  with  its  exquisite  harmony  of  healing  tem- 
perance and  surgeonlike  relentlessness  could  apply  to 
the  masters  today  with  very  little  allowance  for  prog- 
ress. For  appalled  inertia  rules  with  the  segregated 
classes. 

"Most  people  take  the  gifts  that  life  sends  them  without  asking 
of  life  that  it  shall  provide  a  soothing  philosophy  as  well.  To  the 
average  successful  employer,  or  to  the  gentleman  living  on  inherited 
property,  or  to  the  younger  member  of  a  noble  family  on  an  ancient 
sinecure,  the  reflection  that  nine  out  of  ten  of  their  countrymen  were 
rinding  life  a  much  more  difficult  and  painful  business  was  not  al- 
ways knocking  with  a  disturbing  summons  at  heart  and  conscience. 
They  had  not  made  the  world,  and  the  power  that  had  made  it  was 
wiser  than  such  wild  men  as  Paine  or  Cobbett,  or  the  workmen  who 
cheered  a  mountebank  like  Hunt,  broke  up  good  and  expensive  ma- 
chines, and  were  so  stupid  as  to  think  that  strikes  and  quarrels  with 
their  employers  could  mend  anybody's  fortunes.  Life  was  full  of 
strange  phenomena,  and  the  Bible,  with  its  shrewd  outlook,  had  pre- 
pared the  world  for  the  poverty  of  the  poor.  Men  and  women  took 
the  world  as  they  found  it.  This  is  the  attitude  of  all  people  to 
some  of  the  facts,  and  of  some  people  to  all  of  the  facts,  that  meet 
them  day  by  day.  One  of  the  most  powerful  and  passionate  leaders 
of  the  crusade  against  the  long  hours  of  the  factories  has  told  us  how 

[196] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

he  lived  for  many  years  in  Yorkshire  without  discovering  that  there 
was  any  cruelty  in  the  mills,  and  that  John  Wood's  appeal  came  to 
him  as  a  revelation. 

"At  the  end  of  the  [eighteenth]  century  the  belief  took  root  among 
the  governing  class  that  recompense  of  labour  was  fixed  by  natural 
laws,  and  that  no  human  efforts  could  really  alter  it.  Any  struggle 
against  this  decree  of  nature  would  cause  trouble  and  disorganisation, 
and  in  that  way  would  inflict  injury  on  the  labourers  themselves,  but 
it  could  not  increase  their  share  in  the  national  wealth.  That  share 
must  always  remain  somewhere  about  the  level  of  subsistence.  This 
belief  was  introduced  by  the  Physiocrats,  who  had  their  eyes  on  the 
peasant  of  eighteenth  century  France.  As  Turgot  put  it,  'In  every 
sort  of  occupation  it  must  come  to  pass  that  the  wages  of  the  artisan 
are  limited  to  that  which  is  necessary  to  procure  his  subsistence.  // 
ne  gagne  que  sa  vie.'  If  this  doctrine  were  true  the  only  changes  in 
real  wages  would  be  those  consequent  on  changes  of  diet;  if  the  la- 
bourers took  to  living  on  cheaper  food  their  wages  would  go  down,  if 
on  dearer  they  would  go  up.  It  was  the  appreciation  of  this  fact  that 
set  Mai  thus  in  opposition  to  Eden  and  all  the  other  food  reformers 
who  wanted  to  simplify  the  labourer's  meagre  diet  still  further. 
Now,  during  the  last  phase  of  the  ancient  regime,  this  physiocrat  idea 
became  naturalised  in  England.  Both  Malthus  and  Ricardo  contrib- 
uted to  this  result.  Malthus,  who  started  in  revolt  against  the 
optimism  which  believed  in  the  beneficence  of  nature,  laid  down  a 
principle  of  population  which,  by  explaining  poverty,  robbed  it  of  its 
horrors  for  the  rich.  Population,  he  argued,  tends  to  multiply  faster 
than  subsistence.  Poverty  is  therefore  inevitable,  and  unless  mankind 
deliberately  sets  itself  to  check  the  increase  of  the  race,  vice  and 
misery  are  the  only  means  by  which  population  and  food  can  be  ad- 
justed to  each  other.  This  is,  of  course,  a  very  general  sketch  of  his 
teaching,  and  if  we  were  discussing  Malthus  himself  we  should  be 

[  197] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

obliged  to  qualify  this  summary  by  noting  a  number  of  important  con- 
siderations that  enter  into  this  argument.  We  are  concerned  not  with 
what  Malthus  taught  the  world,  but  with  what  the  upper  classes 
learnt  from  him.  For  them  his  teaching  was  simple  and  soothing 
enough.  The  doctrine  that  poverty  was  inevitable  and  incurable  put 
a  soft  pillow  under  the  conscience  of  the  ruling  class.  But  his  teach- 
ing offered  still  greater  consolations  to  the  anxieties  of  the  benevolent, 
for  it  seemed  to  show  that  poverty  was  the  medicine  of  nature,  and 
that  the  attempts  of  Governments  to  relieve  it  were  like  the  interfer- 
ence of  unintelligent  spectators  with  the  skilful  treatment  of  the 
doctor.  The  relief  of  poverty  meant  the  increase  of  poverty,  for  if 
the  conditions  of  the  poor  were  improved,  population  would  quicken 
its  pace  still  further.  Melbourne,  who  thought  that  to  apply  eco- 
nomic principles  to  the  Corn  Laws  would  be  'the  wildest  and  mad- 
dest scheme  that  has  ever  entered  the  imagination  of  man  to  conceive,' 
thought  that  it  was  just  as  wild  and  mad  to  question  the  finality  of 
those  principles  in  sentencing  the  poor  to  eternal  misery.  For  some 
years  the  influence  of  Malthus  was  supreme  and  fatal.  Shelley,  in 
the  preface  to  his  Prometheus  Unbound,  says  that  he  had  rather 
be  damned  with  Plato  and  Lord  Bacon  than  go  to  heaven  with  Paley 
and  Malthus.  It  was  a  strange  heaven  that  Malthus,  as  he  was 
interpreted  by  the  rich,  offered  to  the  poor. 

".  .  .  Ricardo's  brilliant  and  rather  labyrinthine  deductive  reason- 
ing has  led  later  students  to  the  most  diverse  conclusions.  No  thinker 
has  been  so  variously  interpreted,  and  Socialism  and  Individualism 
alike  have  built  on  his  foundations.  But  of  the  character  of  his  im- 
mediate influence  there  can  be  no  doubt.  The  most  important  effect 
of  his  teaching  in  this  particular  sphere  was  to  create  the  impression 
that  every  human  motive  other  than  the  unfailing  principle  of  self- 
interest  might  be  eliminated  from  the  world  of  industry  and  com- 
merce ;  and  that  the  laws  governing  profits  and  wages  were  mechani- 
cal and  fixed.  The  share  of  labour  was  thus  decided  just  like  the 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

price  of  an  article,  by  the  sheer  power  of  competition.    And  this  share 
gravitated  towards  a  minimum  of  subsistence.  .  .  . 

"The  ideas  of  a  working-class  agitation  are  essentially  corporate 
ideas,  the  demand  for  a  better  standard  for  a  race  of  men  and  women : 
the  ideas  of  the  successful  small  employer  are  essentially  individualist 
ideas,  the  demand  that  genius  and  industry  shall  be  free.  On  the  one 
view  a  man's  loyalty  is  due  to  his  fellows:  the  wage  earner  thinks  of 
wage  earners  as  a  class:  he  belongs  primarily  to  a  society  of  men 
with  common  wrongs  and  common  hardships,  seeking  a  common  rem- 
edy. On  the  other,  a  man's  first  duty  is  the  duty  of  self -development : 
the  employer  thinks  of  society  as  a  collection  of  individuals  pursuing 
their  own  ends:  he  mistrusts  the  spirit  of  co-operation,  and  he  thinks 
that  in  a  world  where  to  his  knowledge,  industry  and  concentration 
may  win  the  highest  rewards,  every  man  gets  ultimately  what  he  is 
worth.  The  ideal  working  man  on  the  first  view  tries  to  raise  the 
status  of  his  class;  the  ideal  working  man  on  the  second  view  tries 
to  change  his  own  status  and  to  become  an  employer. 

"On  this  view  of  life  it  seemed  specially  important  to  avoid  dis- 
couraging private  industry  and  effort  by  removing  the  pressure  of 
want.  Society  ought  to  do  nothing  for  its  members  that  the  prudent 
man  would  do  for  himself,  otherwise  the  motive  to  prudence  would 
disappear,  and  men  instead  of  acquiring  property  by  self-denial  would 
live  on  the  public  funds.  Perhaps  the  most  notable  illustration  of 
this  spirit  is  the  speech  in  which  Brougham  defended  the  new  Poor 
Law  in  the  House  of  Lords:  a  speech  in  which  social  imagination 
touches  its  lowest  temperature.  Applying  this  canon  of  the  prudent 
man,  Brougham  argued  that  the  only  evils  against  which  society 
should  protect  people  were  those  the  prudent  man  could  not  foresee; 
he  could  foresee  old  age,  illness,  unemployment :  against  these  he  could 
make  provision.  On  the  other  hand,  society  might  help  him  in  the 
case  of  accidents  and  violent  diseases.  It  is  difficult,  when  one  reads 

[  199] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

this  speech,  to  remember  that  the  prudent  man  who  happened  to  be  a 
hand-loom  weaver  in  Lancashire  (one  of  the  largest  classes  of  work- 
people in  the  country)  was  earning  a  good  deal  less  than  ten  shillings 
a  week.  It  is  perhaps  still  stranger  to  remember  that  no  small  pro- 
portion of  the  class  that  thought  all  this  the  wisdom  of  Solon  were 
living  on  the  public  funds." 

But  the  panorama  of  the  upper  classes  is  not  to  be 
done  in  pure  drab  and  yellow.  England  has  been 
evolving  an  alliance  of  forward-looking  intellectuals 
and  wage-workers  for  nearly  a  century  and  a  half. 
Hardy,  Paine,  Godwin  did  not  live  in  vain.  Shelley 
was  and  is  the  super-poet  of  the  alliance.  Cobbett 
could  begin  life  as  a  conservative  and  end  close  to 
radicalism.  Robert  Owen,  though  he  was  deluged  with 
the  abuse  of  fellow-financiers  and  did,  indeed,  explode 
in  fancies  more  lofty  than  fruitful  in  the  end,  inspired 
the  union  Shop  Movement  of  1822-32.  Some  intellect- 
uals came  straight  from  the  proletariat  and  thus  made 
the  growing  entente  more  serried.  Ebenezer  Elliott, 
for  instance,  rose  from  iron  working  and  with  the  help 
of  a  meager  Presbyterian  education,  struggled  through 
poverty  to  become  the  poet  of  Chartism. 

"When  the  French  Revolution  broke  out  there  was  no  resemblance 
between  the  spirit  of  the  working  classes  in  the  north  and  the  Mid- 
lands, and  the  spirit  of  the  Paris  democrat,  on  fire  with  vivid  and 
emancipating  enthusiasms.  The  English  working  classes  in  the  cen- 
tres of  the  new  industry  were  conservative,  insular,  Philistine.  Man- 
chester, like  Birmingham,  was  predominantly  Church  and  King; 

[  200  ] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

and  nobody  who  reads  Bamford's  description  of  the  treatment  his 
father  and  his  father's  friends  received  at  Middleton  will  make  the 
mistake  of  supposing  that  the  Reformers  whom  Pitt  persecuted  were 
dangerous  to  the  State  by  reason  of  their  popularity.  The  working 
classes,  as  a  body,  in  the  north  and  the  Midlands  were  profoundly 
indifferent  to  ideas  or  causes.  So  long  as  they  could  drink,  watch  a 
cock-fight  or  bull-baiting  or  horse-race,  and  earn  a  reasonable  living, 
they  were  as  contented  as  the  squires  whose  tastes,  if  rather  more 
expensive,  were  in  kind  not  dissimilar.  No  visions  exalted  or  dis- 
turbed their  souls,  and  the  sansculottes  of  Bolton  or  Wigan  were  as 
ready  as  the  parsons  or  the  squires  to  put  anybody  who  talked  or 
looked  like  a  French  Jacobin  into  the  nearest  or  the  darkest  horsepond. 

"By  the  end  of  ...  [the  first  third  of  the  nineteenth  century]  a 
great  change  had  come  over  the  working  classes.  They  had  become 
what  Pitt  and  Castlereagh  tried  so  hard  to  prevent  them  from  be- 
coming, politicians.  They  talked  about  the  affairs  of  the  State: 
they  discussed  the  basis  of  rights  and  duties,  they  took  an  ominous 
interest  in  taxes  and  sinecures,  and  it  was  not  the  phrases  of  1789  but 
the  cry  of  Church  and  King  that  awakened  their  execrations.  All 
the  efforts  of  civilisation  seemed  to  have  been  made  in  vain  when  the 
one  question  that  absorbed  the  minds  of  the  factory  workers  as  they 
poured  from  the  mills  was  the  question  whether  Cobbett's  Political 
Register  had  come  with  the  latest  coach. 

"The  working  classes  were  brought  to  the  revolutionary  temper 
that  broke  out  in  1816  and  1830,  and  found  its  most  complete  expres- 
sion in  the  gospel  of  the  Chartists,  through  a  number  of  stages.  They 
were  not  converted  by  a  lightning  flash  or  by  the  magic  of  a  phrase  or 
by  some  gradual  and  liberating  philosophy.  What  came  about  during 
this  period  was  the  alienation  of  the  working  classes,  due  not  to  the 
positive  influence  of  ideas  or  enthusiasms,  but  to  the  effect  of  exper- 
ience on  ways  of  thinking  and  looking  at  life.  To  say  this  is  not  to 
detract  from  the  superb  and  essential  services  to  the  development  of 

[201  ] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

working-class  thinking  of  such  men  as  Paine,  Cobbett  and  Place, 
and  the  lesser  lights  of  the  Reform  movements :  it  is  merely  to  recog- 
nise the  truth  that  their  teaching  only  bore  fruit  when  actual  exper- 
ience had  made  men  ready  to  receive  it.  There  was  no  general  revolt 
against  the  established  order  in  1790.  The  normal  working  man  ac- 
cepted the  government  and  institutions  of  the  country  with  as  little 
question  as  the  normal  aristocrat.  But  the  Industrial  Revolution 
obliged  everybody  whom  it  affected  to  think  about  the  problems  it 
raised,  and  when  they  addressed  themselves  to  these  problems  the  rich 
and  the  poor  started  from  different  standpoints:  the  rich  from  the 
abstractions  of  property,  the  poor  from  the  facts  of  their  own  lives. 
As  a  result  there  developed  two  different  systems  of  morality.  For  it 
makes  a  great  difference  whether  experience  is  passed  through  the 
sieve  of  hypothesis  and  theory,  or  whether  hypothesis  and  theory  are 
passed  through  the  sieve  of  experience.  The  upper-class  explanations 
ceased  to  be  satisfying  to  men  and  women  who  wanted  to  know  why 
they  were  starving  in  the  midst  of  great  wealth.  Cobbett  and  Paine 
were  intelligible  to  them  and  became  their  guides,  just  because  they 
regarded  society  as  existing  for  human  needs,  and  asked  of  each  insti- 
tution not  whether  it  was  essential  to  an  elaborate  theory  of  property, 
but  how  it  served  men  and  women." 

Great  working-class  leaders  emerged  to  replace 
spiritual  regents  like  Robert  Owen.  John  Doherty 
called  upon  his  fellows  in  The  Voice  of  the  People  to 
organize  their  own  education  against  bourgeois  super- 
stitions and  bourgeois  materialism.  He  sounded  the 
fundamental  note  that  our  goal  is  not  concentrated 
wealth,  but  universal  freedom.  In  his  own  ardent 
words,  the  purpose  of  the  National  Association  for  the 
Protection  of  Labor  was  "to  raise  the  working-classes 

[  202  ] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

from  that  state  of  moral  degredation  in  which  they  were 
at  present  sunk."  This  is  an  exhortation  to  real  direct 
action.  Some  sense  of  the  labor  theory  of  values 
emerges  in  unmistakably  proletarian  accents  in  1818: 

"P  .  .  .d,  a  Beggar-maker,  who  sits  on  the  destinies  of  the  Poor, 
we  have  made  a  Man  of  him,  whose  Mother  hawked  about  the 
Streets  a  small  Basket;  on  two  Spinners  being  deputed  to  ask  for  a 
small  advance  of  Price,  had  the  audacity  to  thrust  one  from  him  with 
an  Umbrella  and  discharged  them  both.  Is  not  this  more  tyrannic 
than  even  the  Dey  of  Algiers,  he  hears  the  complaints  of  the  people, 
then  let  us  hear  no  more  of  Barbarian  cruelty,  for  though  we  work 
six  days  and  make  long  hours,  on  an  average  the  Mule  Spinners  can- 
not earn  half  a  proper  subsistence,  as  their  pale  countenance  will  fully 
demonstrate,  while  their  employers  gain  immense  profits;  we  know 
this  from  the  prices  of  Cotton,  Labour,  and  the  Yarn  when  sold,  and 
we  shall  be  obliged  to  publish  them  to  the  world,  while  we  are  fam- 
ishing, starved,  and  insulted. 

"Spinners,  let  us  swear  to  no  man !  but  we  declare  before  God,  our 
country,  our  wives,  and  children,  we  will  not  work  and  see  them 
starve;  will  they  call  this  vagrancy  and  immure  our  bodies  in  gaols? 
Unfeeling  Tyrants!  when  we  refuse  to  work  and  starve,  you  say  we 
are  conspiring  against  the  Government,  charge  us  with  Sedition,  send 
soldiers  to  coherse  us,  and  in  the  Green  Bag  stile,  assure  the  Govern- 
ors we  are  plotting  against  them;  it  is  false,  we  are  ready  to  protect 
our  country  against  foreign  and  domestic  enemies,  but  we  will  not 
submit  to  selfish  Trading  Tyrants:  they  asserted  in  the  House  of 
Lords  that  our  employ  was  the  most  healthy  followed,  but  Lord 
Liverpool  detected  the  trading  liars,  and  said  it  was  impossible:  let 
these  miscreants  remember  what  was  done  in  France  at  the  bridge 
of  Pont  Neuf,  by  a  fool  of  an  officer  beating  an  old  man  with  the 
flat  side  of  his  sword." 

[203] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

Again  a  vague,  but  vigorous,  hint  of  the  labor  theory 
of  values  emerges  in  a  sentence  in  a  proletarian  broad- 
sheet cast  about  the  street. 

"The  laws  that  condemned  me  were  made  by  the  great,  and  have 
no  other  object  than  to  keep  the  wealth  of  the  world  in  their  own 
power,  and  entail  on  others  keenest  poverty  and  vilest  subjection." 

Workers  crusaded  successfully  for  a  cheap  press. 
Their  most  puissant  heroes  were  devoted  men  whose 
names  have  not  come  down  to  us  at  all.  As  the  Ham- 
monds put  it: 

"Of  all  the  documents  in  the  Home  Office  papers,  none  illustrates 
better  the  difficulties  of  that  struggle  than  a  confiscated  copy-book, 
seized  by  an  active  magistrate  and  sent  to  the  Home  Office  in  a  time 
of  panic  as  a  dangerous  piece  of  sedition,  in  which  a  working  man, 
secretary  of  a  little  society  of  working-men  Reformers,  had  been  prac- 
tising his  elementary  powers  of  writing  and  spelling." 

It  is  to  be  hoped  that  our  handful  of  examples  from 
the  rich  historical  writing  of  the  Hammonds  will  be 
representative  enough  to  add  confirmation  to  the  thesis 
of  Boas  and  to  our  own  assertion  of  the  fundamental 
wish  to  love  without  painting  a  picture  of  proletarians 
in  the  selected  colors  of  idealization.  These  examples 
may  give  us  a  glimpse  of  the  first  emergence  of  direct 
action  in  the  modern  labor  movement  and  of  the  first 
tendencies  towards  an  entente  of  intellectuals  and  wage- 
workers.  It  is  beyond  the  scope  of  this  book  even  to 
outline  the  history  of  direct  action  in  the  international 
labor  movement  and  its  progressive  convergence  with 

[204] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

all  that  is  best  in  the  ethical  thought  of  the  emancipated 
minority  of  intellectuals.  But  we  may  glance  a  mo- 
ment at  the  psychological  tendencies  of  the  proletariat 
today  and  note  its  vastly  more  comprehensive  and  sus- 
tained harmony  with  the  work  of  our  most  dis- 
tinguished educationalists,  those  who  have  not  been 
paralyzed  by  dying  institutions.  In  order  to  make  the 
point  in  the  most  uncompromising,  realistic  fashion  we 
will  select,  not  the  more  generally  accepted  or  "respect- 
able" activities  of  the  proletariat,  but  those  exuberant 
conations  which  arouse  the  greatest  fear  in  the  segre- 
gated classes  today — sabotage,  the  general  strike,  and 
the  "dictatorship  of  the  proletariat." 

"The  bottom  reflects  the  top,"  say  some  of  our  mili- 
tant proletarians.  The  violence  of  the  "upper"  classes 
is  the  cause  of  the  violence  of  the  "lower"  classes.  And 
one  of  our  most  humane  intellectuals,  Mr.  Robert 
Hunter,  has  amassed  a  formidable  amount  of  evidence 
in  support  of  this  in  his  Violence  and  the  Labor  Move- 
ment. 

But  I  wish  to  extend  this  thesis.  In  its  weakest  mo- 
ments the  bottom  reflects  the  top  and  for  violence  the 
upper  classes  must  be  held  fundamentally  responsible 
by  all  people  who  care  to  affix  responsibility  and  to  do 
so  honestly.  But  I  am  more  interested  in  the  fact  that 
the  bottom  also  improves  upon  the  top  by  sublimating 
the  violences  of  the  top.  Sabotage,  the  withdrawal  of 

[205] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

efficiency  from  industry,  is,  as  Professor  Veblen  has 
several  times  shown  at  some  length,  not  a  proletarian, 
but  a  bourgeois  invention,  the  very  essence  of  the  bour- 
geois price  system  of  economics,  the  unscrupulous  con- 
trol of  supply  to  keep  up  prices.    Whether  it  be  the 
sabotage  of  individuals,  such  as  the  dumping  of  fish  into 
San  Francisco  Bay  to  keep  up  the  price  of  fish,  whik 
the  unfortunate  may  starve  and  be  damned,  or  whether 
it  be  a  gigantic  imperialistic  sabotage  like  the  present 
allied  blockade  of  Russia,  which  is  a  withdrawal  of 
efficiency  from  industry  for  the  purpose  of  preserving 
the  vile  price  system  from  complete  destruction  at 
the  hands  of  the  greatest  reconstructive  crusade  the 
world  has  ever  known,  capitalistic  sabotage  is  always 
more  brutal  than  proletarian  sabotage  and  seems  to 
grow  more  and  more  brutal.     Dumping  fish  into  the 
sea,  with  all  that  that  implies,  is  more  brutal  than  the 
work  of  any  proletarian  sabotagers.     And  the  block- 
ade of  Russia  is  a  piece  of  wholesale  brutality  before 
which  the  more  obvious  and  more  theatrical  German 
atrocities  in  Belgium  pale.     By  contrast,  proletarian 
sabotage  is  one  of  the  most  paradoxical  activities  in 
contemporary  society.    On  its  crudest  level  it  may  be 
putting  emery  in  oil-cups  to  injure  a  machine.    But  this 
is  so  much  against  creative  impulses  and  the  creative 
impulses  of  the  proletariat  are  so  much  less  repressed 
by  possessive  activities  in  the  proletariat  than  in  the 

[206] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

tradition-ridden,  property-worshipping  segregated 
class  that  the  proletariat  is  compelled  by  its  freer  love 
of  love  to  make  sabotage  progressively  humaner.  So,  in 
due  time,  some  proletarians  learn  to  make  their  sabo- 
tage take  the  unique  form  of  obeying  scrupulously  the 
laws  of  an  industry — as  on  certain  railroads  where  the 
employers  have  made  scores  of  laws  for  appearance 
sake,  which  they  do  not  desire  to  have  observed,  since 
to  observe  them  may  mean  a  widespread  retardation  of 
traffic.  Some  of  these  laws,  like  certain  ones  which  re- 
late to  the  coupling  of  freight  cars,  appear  to  be  for 
the  prevention  of  accident  to  the  employee;  they  are  in 
reality  for  the  prevention  of  suit  against  the  employer, 
and  the  employee  is  expected  quietly  to  disregard  them. 
For  if  the  employee  obeys  the  law  and  take  due  pre- 
cautions over  his  life  and  limbs,  the  time-schedules, 
which  are  also  devised  by  the  employer,  are  seriously 
disorganized. 

But  let  us  turn  to  an  authoritative  proletarian  defini- 
tion and  description  of  sabotage  and  its  evolution  among 
the  workers  by  Miss  Elizabeth  Gurley  Flynn: 

"Sabotage  means  primarily:  the  withdrawal  of  efficiency.  Sabotage 
means  either  to  slacken  up  and  interfere  with  the  quantity,  or  to  botch 
in  your  skill  and  interfere  with  the  quality  of  capitalist  production 
or  to  give  poor  service.  Sabotage  is  not  physical  violence,  sabotage  is 
an  internal,  industrial  process.  It  is  something  that  is  fought  out 
within  the  four  walls  of  the  shop.  And  these  three  forms  of  sabotage 
— to  affect  the  quality,  the  quantity  and  the  service — are  aimed  at  af- 

[207] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

fecting  the  profit  of  the  employer.  Sabotage  is  a  means  of  striking  at 
the  employer's  profit  for  the  purpose  of  forcing  him  into  granting  cer- 
tain conditions,  even  as  workmen  strike  for  the  same  purpose  of  co- 
ercing him.  ......... 

"Take  the  case  of  Frederic  Surnner  Boyd.  .  .  .  Boyd  said  this: 
'If  you  go  back  to  work  and  you  find  scabs  working  alongside  of  you, 
you  should  put  a  little  vinegar  on  the  reed  of  the  loom  in  order  to 
prevent  its  operation.'  They  have  arrested  him  under  the  statute 
forbidding  the  advocacy  of  the  destruction  of  property.  He  advised 
the  dyers  to  go  into  the  dye  houses  arid  to  use  certain  chemicals  in 
the  dyeing  of  the  silk  that  would  make  that  silk  unweavable.  That 
sounded  very  terrible  in  the  newspapers  and  very  terrible  in  the 
court  of  law.  But  what  neither  the  newspapers  nor  the  courts  of  law 
have  taken  any  cognizance  of  is  that  these  chemicals  are  being  used 
already  in  the  dyeing  of  silk.  It  is  not  a  new  thing  that  Boyd  is  ad- 
vocating, it  is  something  that  is  being  practiced  in  every  dye  house 
in  the  city  of  Paterson  already,  but  it  is  being  practiced  for  the  em- 
ployer and  not  for  the  worker. 

"Let  me  give  you  a  specific  illustration  of  what  I  mean.  Seventy- 
five  years  ago  when  silk  was  woven  into  cloth  the  silk  skein  was 
taken  in  the  pure,  dyed  and  woven,  and  when  that  piece  of  silk  was 
made  it  would  last  for  fifty  years.  Your  grandmother  could  wear  it 
as  a  wedding  dress.  Your  mother  could  wear  it  as  a  wedding  dress 
also.  And  then  if  you,  woman  reader,  were  fortunate  enough  to 
have  a  chance  to  get  married,  you  could  wear  it  as  a  wedding  dress 
also.  But  the  silk  that  you  buy  today  is  not  dyed  in  the  pure  and 
woven  into  a  strong  and  durable  product.  One  pound  of  silk  goes 
into  the  dye  house  and  usually  as  many  as  three  to  fifteen  pounds  come 
out.  That  is  to  say,  along  with  the  dyeing  there  is  an  extraneous 
and  an  unnecessary  process  of  what  is  very  picturesquely  called  'dy- 
namiting.' They  weight  the  silk.  They  have  solutions  of  tin,  solu- 
tions of  zinc,  solutions  of  lead.  If  you  will  read  the  journals  of  the 

[208] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

Silk  Association  of  America  you  will  find  in  there  advice  to  master 
dyers  as  to  which  salts  are  the  most  appropriate  for  weighting  pur- 
poses. .  .  .  And  so  when  you  buy  a  nice  piece  of  silk  today  and  have 
a  dress  made  for  festive  occasions,  you  hang  it  away  in  the  wardrobe 
and  when  you  take  it  out  it  is  cracked  down  the  pleats  and  along  the 
waist  and  arms.  And  you  believe  that  you  have  been  terribly  cheated 
by  a  clerk.  What  is  actually  wrong  is  that  you  have  paid  for  silk 
where  you  have  received  old  tin  cans  and  zinc  and  lead  and  things 
of  that  sort.  You  have  a  dress  that  is  garnished  with  silk,  seasoned 
with  silk,  but  a  dress  that  is  adulterated  to  the  point  where,  if  it  was 
adulterated  just  the  slightest  degree  more,  it  would  fall  to  pieces 
entirely. 

"Now  what  Frederic  Sumner  Boyd  advocated  to  the  silk  workers 
was  in  effect  this :  'You  do  for  yourselves  what  you  are  already  doing 
for  your  employers.  Put  these  same  things  into  the  silk  for  yourself 
and  your  own  purposes  as  you  are  putting  in  for  the  employers'  pur- 
poses.' And  I  can't  imagine — even  in  a  court  of  law — where  they 
can  find  the  fine  thread  of  deviation — where  the  master  dyers'  sabot- 
age is  legal  and  the  workers'  sabotage  illegal,  where  they  consist  of 
identically  the  same  thing  and  where  the  silk  remains  intact.  The 
silk  is  there.  The  loom  is  there.  There  is  no  property  destroyed 
by  the  process.  The  one  thing  that  is  eliminated  is  the  efficiency  of 
the  worker  to  cover  up  this  adulteration  of  the  silk,  to  carry  it  just  to 
the  point  where  it  will  weave  and  not  be  detected.  That  efficiency 
is  withdrawn.  The  veil  is  torn  off  production  in  the  silk-dyeing 
houses  and  silk  mills  and  the  worker  simply  says,  'Here,  I  will  take 
my  hands  off  and  I  will  show  you  what  it  is.  I  will  show  you  how 
rotten,  how  absolutely  unusable  the  silk  actually  is  that  they  are  pass- 
ing off  on  the  public  at  two  and  three  dollars  a  yard.' 

"Now,  Boyd's  form  of  sabotage  was  not  the  most  dangerous  form 
of  sabotage  at  that.  If  the  judges  had  any  imagination  they  would 
know  that  Boyd's  form  of  sabotage  was  pretty  mild  compared  with 

[209] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 


this:  Suppose  he  had  said  to  the  dyers  in  Patterson,  to  a  sufficient 
number  of  them  that  they  could  do  it  as  a  whole,  so  that  it  would 
affect  every  dye  house  in  Paterson:  'Instead  of  introducing  these 
chemicals  for  adulteration,  don't  introduce  them  at  all.  Take  the 
lead,  the  zinc,  and  the  tin  and  throw  it  down  the  sewer  and  weave  the 
silk,  beautiful,  pure,  durable  silk,  just  as  it  is.  Dye  it  pound  for 
pound,  hundred  pound  for  hundred  pound.'  The  employers  would 
have  been  more  hurt  by  that  form  of  sabotage  than  by  what  Boyd  ad- 
vocated. And  they  would  probably  have  wanted  him  put  in  jail  for 
life  instead  of  for  seven  years.  In  other  words,  to  advocate  non- 
adulteration  is  a  lot  more  dangerous  to  capitalist  interests  than  to 
advocate  adulteration.  And  non-adulteration  is  the  highest  form 
of  sabotage  in  an  establishment  like  the  dye  houses  of  Patterson, 
bakeries,  confectioners,  meat  packing  houses,  restaurants,  etc." 

The  first  nai've,  desperate  sabotage  of  a  loosely  or- 
ganized body  of  unskilled  workmen  is  entirely  unjusti- 
fiable from  an  ethical  point  of  view;  it  is  simply  a  ques- 
tion of  grim  and  squalid  necessity.  But  sabotage  has 
not  merely  an  almost  inevitable  beginning;  it  gropes  to- 
wards freedom.  For  the  practitioners  of  sabotage  are 
not  fatalistic  in  spite  of  the  almost  crushing  circum- 
stances under  which  they  begin.  Their  working  hy- 
pothesis of  moral  autonomy  or  direct  action  inspires 
them  to  experiment  until  they  have  sublimated  sabo- 
tage until  we  may  well  stand  amazed  at  their  imagina- 
tive agility  and  fundamental  health.  Obviously  the 
practice  of  "bouche  ouverte"  (the  practice  of  telling 
the  consumer  in  answer  to  his  questions  the  exact  truth 
about  the  goods  he  buys  of  you  in  drug-store  or  restau- 

[210] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

rant)  is  a  form  of  sabotage  on  a  rather  higher  level  than 
the  practice  of  putting  emery  into  the  oil-boxes.  Still 
this  remains  rather  petty  when  one  considers  its  motiva- 
tion. But,  without  ever  quite  emancipating  themselves 
from  the  dangerous  motivation  as  long  as  they  indulge 
in  sabotage  at  all,  the  wrorkers  can  sublimate  it  still 
further  as  exemplified  by  Mr.  Cole: 

"A  particularly  interesting  form  of  sabotage  is  that  by  which  work 
is  done  slowly  but  very  well.  The  journal  of  the  Building  Trade, 
Le  Travailleur  du  Bailment,  recommends  it  to  the  workers  in  these 
words:  'Camarades  sabotons  bien  les  heures  du  travail,  en  faisant  de 
I'art  dans  nos  metiers  respectifs'  This  appeal  to  commit  sabotage 
against  the  jerrybuilder,  'by  turning  out  art  in  their  respective  trades,' 
is  one  which,  could  it  be  organized,  would  be  open  to  no  complaints 
on  social  grounds.  It,  in  fact,  meets  the  complaint  made  by  the  the- 
orists of  syndicalism,  MM.  Sorel  and  Berth,  that  most  forms  of  sa- 
botage lower  the  morality  of  the  workers." 

Perhaps  Mr.  Cole  is  a  little  too  charitable  here. 
Sabotage  certainly  always  suffers,  even  in  its  most  high- 
ly sublimated  forms  from  the  tinge  of  hatred  in  its 
motivation.  My  point  here  is  simply  that  proletarian 
sabotage  moves  progressively  towards  truth,  beauty, 
love;  bourgeois  sabotage  moves  towards  the  attempt  to 
starve  a  whole  nation  because  that  nation  is  too  sublime 
to  leap  from  the  Scylla  of  czarism  into  the  Charybdis- 
maw  of  capitalism.  It  would  appear  that  while  the 
creativity  of  the  "upper"  class  is  being  rapidly  crushed 
by  the  dominance  of  possessive  reactions,  the  creative 

[211] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

impulses  of  the  workers  who  are  snubbed  as  born  in- 
feriors are  rapidly  ripening  to  save  the  human  race 
from  destroying  itself  and  from  following  the  long  line 
of  "nature's  mistakes"  about  which  Mr.  Trotter  has 
written  with  such  gloomily  foreboding  eloquence. 

The  "general  strike"  shows  a  similar  progressive  re- 
lease of  humaneness,  an  increasingly  rational  control  of 
force.  The  general  strike,  for  our  purposes,  may  be 
divided  into  two  kinds:  (i)  the  Universal  General 
Strike  with  which  the  internationalized  proletariat 
will,  so  the  dream  goes,  take  over  without  bloodshed 
the  control  of  the  society  of  the  entire  world;  (2)  the 
minor,  local  or  national,  recurrent  general  strikes  or 
mass-actions,  abrupt,  seeking  quick  results  for  imme- 
diate practical  purposes,  and  seeking  more  remotely  as 
processes  of  gradual  education  to  prepare  for  the  dis- 
tant day  when  the  proletariat  will  be  sufficiently  re- 
sourceful to  undertake  the  construction  of  the  United 
States  of  Humanity.  At  first  the  general  strike  was  a 
Utopian  dream.  But,  particularly  in  the  last  decade, 
the  militant  proletariat  has  been  experimenting  in 
many  lands  and  it  has  only  increased  its  faith  in  the 
reality  of  general  strikes.  Mass-actions  in  fairly  homo- 
geneous nations  are  remarkable  enough.  But  some 
phenomena  in  America  seem  little  short  of  miraculous. 
At  Wheatland,  California,  an  abject  mass  of  unskilled 
workmen  assembled,  under  unspeakably  filthy  living 

[212] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

conditions,  to  gather  hops  for  the  rancher.  In  two  days 
these  "illiterates"  had  listened  to  addresses  in  seven 
languages  and  were  organized  for  a  non-resistant  de- 
fiance that  became  violent  only  after  the  example  was 
set  by  a  sheriff's  posse  which  represented  the  Law  and 
the  State.  Twice  now  at  Lawrence,  Massachusetts,  an 
even  more  extraordinary  organization  of  an  even  more 
multi-lingual  human  chaos  has  belied  all  the  hopes  of 
American  employers  of  stamping  out  unionism  by  the 
importation  of  ignorant  immigrant  hordes.  Lawrence 
twice  has  sounded  solemn  warning  to  the  grandsons  of 
New  England  poets  and  patriots  to  think  well  lest  they 
remain  too  long  on  the  side  of  the  Tories  and  the  Cop- 
perheads of  the  twentieth  century.  It  is  true  that  these 
unskilled  laborers  were  assisted  by  socialists  and  by 
other  organizations  and  individuals  momentarily 
aroused  from  their  sectarianism.  But  this  does  not 
account  for  the  sustained  morale  of  these  almost  mys- 
tical outbursts,  which  in  increasing  numbers  are  be- 
wildering both  radicals  and  conservatives.  Crude  as 
these  mass-actions  seem  to  the  uninitiated,  they  are 
full  of  beauty  to  those  who  seek  to  understand.  At 
Lawrence  of  late  the  half-starved  Belgian  workers 
collected  money  to  give  a  picnic  to  their  half-starved 
German  fellow-workers  in  order  to  demonstrate  the  vast 
brotherhood  of  all  workers.  In  the  Swedish  general 
strike  the  proletariat  of  the  press  refused  to  print  lies 

[213] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

against  other  laborers  and  raised  the  defiant  cry  against 
editors  and  owners:  "Either  you  print  the  truth  or 
you'll  print  no  paper  at  all."  Just  here  arose  the  dawn 
of  a  momentous  reform  which  to  those  of  us  who  are 
heartsick  over  the  utter  degradation  of  the  press  is  cer- 
tainly one  of  the  greatest  hopes  for  education,  for 
democracy,  for  truth-seeking.  The  Swedish  printers 
acted  an  Areopagltica  which  will  take  an  honorable 
place  in  the  history  of  freedom  of  thought  along  with 
Milton's  book.  If  you  will  read  the  details  of  the 
Seattle  general  strike  you  will  read  of  many  instances 
of  proletarian  magnanimity  and  self-discipline, 

General  strikes  are  just  beginning  to  operate  in  such 
a  way  as  to  achieve  for  workmen  that  sense  of  the  dig- 
nity, the  creative  implications  of  their  work  which 
they  lost  with  modern  capitalism  and  the  Industrial 
Revolution.  In  other  words  general  strikes  are  minis- 
tering successfully,  if  sporadically,  to  that  social  disease 
which  Ruskin  and  Morris  diagnosed,  but  could  not  cure 
because  even  they  were  not  completely  emancipated 
from  that  Victorian  dissociation  of  the  useful  and  the 
beautiful  which  overwhelmed  even  the  poets  of  the 
period.  The  buoyant  hope  of  general  strikers,  as  they 
learn  how  to  minister  to  the  complex  needs  of  a  whole 
city  for  a  few  days  contrasts  dramatically  with  the  wist- 
ful, psychasthenic  medievalism  of  the  half-reactionary 
Ruskin  and  Morris.  The  really  awakened  proletarian 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

never  dreams,  of  course,  of  a  sentimental  equalitarian 
leveling  down;  he  aims  at  democratic  ownership  which 
will  give  every  co-operating  worker  at  least  a  humble 
share  and  so  restore  his  joy  in  work,  his  feeling  that 
(even  though  he  may  not  himself  be  finishing  a  crea- 
tion as  medieval  craftsmen  did)  he  is  a  living  part  of  a 
great  creative  movement  whose  policies  in  part  he  can 
direct,  whose  vast  processes  he  can  at  least  understand. 
Probably  this  spirit  of  creation  with  a  spirit  of  identifi- 
cation with  one's  fellows,  this  creation  of  a  work  too 
grand  for  the  capacities  of  an  individual  will  prove  to 
be  far  more  inspiring  than  the  medieval  craftsman's 
half-possessive  satisfaction  in  the  completion  of  his  own 
rather  limited  job,  although  the  splendid  co-operative 
work  on  the  cathedrals  certainly  foreshadows  the  goal 
towards  which  the  general  strike  moves  today. 

No  one  has  written  more  discerningly  of  American 
general  strikers  than  Mr.  Austin  Lewis,  a  California 
lawyer,  who  for  years  has  been  their  dauntless  de- 
fender in  the  face  of  abuse  that  wrould  have  crushed  a 
dozen  ordinary  well-meaning  men.  He  explodes  a 
common  superstition  that  the  migratory  general  strikers 
of  the  Pacific  Coast  are  social  jetsam  and  elderly  liquor 
sodden  "bums." 

"On  the  contrary,  this  body  of  men  consists  for  the  most  part  of 
young  bachelors  in  the  full  flower  of  youthful  vigor.  No  others  could 
do  their  work  or  endure  the  hardships  which  they  daily  face." 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

They  are,  as  he  notes  elsewhere,  the  laborers  who 
are  transforming  the  majestic  lineaments  of  California, 
which  is  changing  so  rapidly  with  its  execution  of 
epical  industrial  schemes. 

"It  is  the  poorest  sort  of  sophistry  to  speak  of  these  men  as  passive 
and  disinclined  to  rise.  On  the  contrary,  they  form  some  of  the  very 
finest  fighting  material  to  be  found  anywhere  and  will  go  readily 
against  odds,  if  once  they  have  learned  the  trick  of  solidarity  and  or- 
ganized government." 

We  have  seen  how  with  the  strikers  at  Lawrence  in- 
ternationalism is  not  a  mere  matter  of  dreaming  vague- 
ly of  a  luxuriously  remote  league  to  enforce  peace  as 
one  strolls,  secluded  from  life's  grimmest  tragedies, 
under  academic  elms  or  frets  and  fumes  in  the  closet 
of  the  politicians  and  editors  and  ministers.  It  is 
through  the  Russian  general  strikes  that  the  ideal  of 
no  annexation,  no  idemnities  was  forced  upon  the  atten- 
tion of  an  inert  and  despairing  world.  Mr.  Austin 
Lewis  gives  us  another  example  of  this  lyrical  inter- 
nationalism as  it  transfigures  into  love  the  deluded  race- 
hatreds that  fill  the  Californian  "upper"  classes  and  the 
parochial  craft-unionists  of  California  with  such  fevers 
today. 

"During  the  agitation  on  the  Durst  hop-ranch  the  Japanese  workers 
voluntarily  threw  in  their  lot  with  the  rest  of  the  workers.  The 
spokesman  for  the  Japanese  stated,  rather  astutely,  that  it  would 
probably  not  be  for  the  advantage  of  the  white  workers  for  the  Japa- 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

nese  openly  to  espouse  their  cause  and  strike  with  them.  By  this  he 
meant  that  the  feeling  of  ...  [the  skilled  craftsmen]  against  the 
Japanese  was  so  general  throughout  the  State  that  the  association  of 
the  Japanese  with  the  strikers  would  in  all  probability  be  detrimental 
to  the  latter.  He  said  that  in  order  not  to  embarass  the  situation  for 
the  projectors  of  the  strike  the  Japanese  would  withdraw  from  the 
field  in  a  body,  which,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  they  did.  [This  meant 
that  they  voluntarily  accepted  all  the  sacrifices  and  hardships  that  a 
strike  involves  but  that  at  the  same  time  they  voluntarily  renounced 
all  the  benefits  that  might  accrue  therefrom.] 

"This  same  spirit  pervaded  the  entire  mass  of  the  employees  on  the 
Durst  ranch,  and  according  to  the  testimony  of  a  gang-boss  employed 
in  superintending  labor  during  the  hop-picking  season,  no  less  than 
twenty-seven  languages  were  spoken  by  the  workers.  Syrians,  Porto 
Ricans,  Mexicans,  an  heterogeneous  collection  of  races  and  breeds 
left  work  simultaneously,  and  were  a  unit  in  support  of  the  demands 
of  the  strikers. 

"This  was  no  slight  matter,  for  the  majority  of  them  were  practi- 
cally penniless;  they  were  far  from  the  centres  of  population,  and 
to  leave  work  meant,  in  many  cases,  to  go  hungry.  To  them  solidar- 
ity was  an  essential  fact  of  life. 

"Being  unskilled  workers  and  not  having  any  special  craft,  trade,  or 
property  on  which  they  could  depend,  they  were  driven  to  rely  upon 
mass  action  for  life  and  for  protection  against  the  aggression  of  the 
employer.  To  them,  therefore,  'solidarity'  expressed  not  an  ideal, 
not  a  distant  goal,  not  a  political  achievement,  as  to  the  Socialist,  but 
that  mass-action  to  which  they  were  necessarily  driven  and  upon 
which  they  could  alone  rely. 

"Shall  we  say  then  that  'solidarity'  is  incomprehensible  except  to 
those  workers  to  whom  mass-action  is  imperative?" 

"Such  an  answer  would  be  close  to  the  facts,  for  the  meaning  of 
'solidarity'  can  only  be  learned  by  experience." 

[217] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

We  have  often  written  here  of  the  "mob,  cultivated 
and  uncultivated."  The  class-character  of  mobs  dif- 
fers in  different  ages  and  environments.  What  a  para- 
dox it  would  be  if,  in  the  future  histories  ot  the  twen- 
tieth century  it  should  be  recorded  that  the  mass-acts 
of  unskilled,  illiterate  workers  groping  towards  indus- 
trial unions  were  the  beautiful  and  orderly  perform- 
ances and  that  the  mobs  of  our  day  were  composed  of 
university  men,  journalists,  policemen,  clerks,  evan- 
gelists, preachers,  strike-breakers,  conservative  craft- 
unionists,  soldiers  and  sailors!  The  average  young 
bourgeois  American,  whose  knowledge  is  limited  by  the 
morbid  complexes  which  his  grandfather  developed 
after  reading  the  newspaper  legends  about  the  Chicago 
Haymarket  affair  of  the  '8o's,  would  do  well  to  read 
and  ponder  this  profound  piece  of  twentieth  century 
social  psychology  by  Austin  Lewis : 

"  'Street-rows'  are  and  have  always  been  the  mark  of  the  unde- 
veloped labor  movement,  and  have  occurred  most  frequently  in  places 
where  mass  action  of  the  modern  type  is  quite  unknown.  In  the  ear- 
lier stages  of  the  labor  movement  in  all  countries  we  find  the  same 
mob  displays.  The  American  labor  movement  in  its  infancy  cul- 
minating in  the  Haymarket  tragedy,  showed  many  evidences  of  such 
turbulence,  but  none  of  these  could  be  described  as  mass-action  of 
the  industrial  proletariat.  There  were,  on  the  contrary,  for  the  most 
part  demonstrations  of  the  craft  unionists  who  have  much  in  com- 
mon with  the  small  bourgeois  and  whose  mode  of  fighting  has  many 
of  the  same  characteristics. 

[2.8] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

"To  this  effect  we  may  quote  Eckstein,  with  whom  for  once  we 
are  pleased  to  be  in  substantial  agreement.  He  says: 

'  'The  petty  bourgeoisie,  where  it  is  rebellious,  is  closely  attached 
to  anarchism,  not  only  as  regards  opposition  to  the  state,  but  as 
against  every  kind  of  centralized  power.  In  this  respect  it  is  differen- 
tiated markedly  from  the  proletariat  of  the  greater  industry  to  whom 
the  process  of  production  itself  declares  the  necessity  of  a  centralized 
tendency.  The  proletariat  is  against  government  as  the  instrument 
of  the  will  of  the  ruling  class,  but  it  is  not  against  the  systematic 
organization  and  control  of  production  of  which  the  petty  bourgeois 
has  no  comprehension.  The  ideal  of  the  latter  is  a  free  society  of  in- 
dependent small  producers.  .  .  . 

'  'The  petty  bourgeois  is  naturally  an  individualist.  Under  the 
compulsion  of  necessity  he  can  act  with  others  of  his  kind  for  an  im- 
mediate purpose,  but  he  cannot  create  a  permanent  organization  de- 
voted to  continuous  work  for  a  common  interest.' 

"This  passage  might  even  have  gone  further  and  included  the 
pure  and  simple  trade  unions  as  being  almost  at  one  with  the  small 
bourgeois  in  this  respect.  In  fact  the  actions  of  the  skilled  artisans 
have  generally  tended  to  show  that  they  have  a  closer  psychological 
connection  with  the  small  middle  class  than  with  the  industrial  prole- 
tariat. 

"Actually  the  new  mass- action  movement  has  produced  less  disor- 
der, fewer  street  demonstrations  and  an  insignificant  amount  of  fric- 
tion with  the  police  and  the  authorities  as  compared  with  former 
labor  activities. 

"A  reason  for  this  may  be  found  in  a  distinction  overlooked  by 
Eckstein  in  the  above  quotation.  He  says  in  effect  that  the  rebellious 
small  bourgeois  is  against  government  as  such,  but  that  the  proletarian 
is  against  it  only  as  expressing  the  will  of  the  ruling  class  and  as  an 
instrument  of  that  class.  .  .  . 

".  .  .  The  modern  industrial  proletarian  seldom  troubles  his  head 

[219] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

about  government.  The  real  Marxian  idea  of  the  government  as  being 
the  mere  mirror  of  the  actual  power,  the  economic  and  industrial  con- 
trol, has  completely  entered  into  his  consciousness  and  he  knows  that 
he  has  nothing  to  do  with  government  until  he  has  possession  of  the 
material  power  which  lies  at  the  base  of  all  government. 

"This  notion  once  in  the  mind  of  the  masses,  the  field  of  industrial 
conflict  is  transferred  at  once  from  the  streets,  where  it  has  no  place, 
to  the  shop,  the  natural  and  unavoidable  battle-field.  Hence  the  fact 
that  modern  mass-action  is  neither  tumultuous  nor  inclined  to  anti- 
governmental  outbreaks.  It  is  true  that  where  organizations  are 
weak  and  have  entered  on  a  fight  for  which  they  are  not  prepared, 
and  where  the  position  of  the  government  is  so  secure  that  it  feels 
able  to  use  the  police  with  impunity,  violence  may  occur.  But  such 
examples  are  belated  instances  of  a  pre-organization  period  with  which 
mass-action  has  no  connection,  seeing  that  mass-action  is  an  altogether 
later  development. 

"As  long  ago  as  1905  Bebel  said  in  the  [Socialist]  Party  Con- 
gress at  Jena: 

,  "Situations  are  approaching  which  must  of  physical  necessity 
lead  to  catastrophes,  unless  the  working  class  develop  so  rapidly  in 
power,  numbers,  culture  and  insight  that  the  bourgeoisie  lose  the  de- 
sire for  catastrophes.  We  are  not  seeking  a  catastrophe,  of  what  use 
would  it  be  to  us?  Catastrophes  are  brought  about  by  the  ruling 
classes.' 

"The  wanton  employment  of  armed  force  against  a  peaceful  dem- 
onstration would  be  the  end  of  any  existing  government.  Besides,  the 
anti-militarist  campaign  is  an  essential  concomitant  of  a  real  indus- 
trial movement.  This  may  be  seen  in  France  and  there  are  also  plenty 
of  evidences  of  it  in  England.  Whatever  may  happen,  the  bourgeois 
regime  will  not  die  fighting  in  the  streets. 

"The  political  speaker,  engaged  in  making  agitation  and  gathering 

[  220  ] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

votes  from  a  mass  of  unorganized  people,  is  obliged  to  make  constant 
appeals  to  a  mob-psychology  which  he  observes  to  be  generally  shifting 
and  unreliable. 

"Hence  he  concludes  that  the  mob  is  fickle,  which  is,  indeed,  true 
when  it  is  lashed  with  a  sudden  emotion  under  the  influence  of  an 
idea.  But  an  organized  mass  moving  to  a  material  end  has  essential 
elements  of  stability,  so  that  there  does  not  seem  to  be  any  good 
reason  why  it  should  not  be  capable  of  a  definite  and  even  prolonged 
efliciency  and  cohesiveness.  Indeed,  such  recent  examples  of  mass- 
action  as  have  come  under  our  observation  tend  to  show  a  resolu- 
tion and  perseverance  not  surpassed  by  any  of  those  organizations  of 
too  closely  organized  crafts  which  Kautsky  appears  to  regard  as 
models.  It  is  true  that  it  is  impossible  to  maintain  a  protracted 
struggle  in  the  form  of  mass-action  but  such  considerations  pertain 
rather  to  the  technique  of  strikes  than  to  the  general  question  of  the 
utility  of  mass  action  as  a  revolutionary  weapon,  and  do  not  call  for 
examination  at  this  particular  point. 

"Mass  action  is  not  'action  of  the  streets,'  nor  is  it  the  turbulence  of 
political  mobs  directed  against  established  government  and  marked 
by  rioting.  It  is  the  action  of  the  organized  working  class." 

Let  us  allow  our  imaginations  to  play  around  this 
question  of  the  sublimation  of  the  general  strike,  build- 
ing from  the  basis  of  a  contemporary  situation  a  fanci- 
ful, but  perfectly  conceivable  development  that  will 
further  exemplify  the  potentialities  of  mass-action. 
Those  who  took  part  in  the  copper-mine  strikes  at 
Bisbee,  Arizona,  and  Butte,  Montana,  were  men  whose 
lives  are  limited  by  the  hideous  conditions  of  their  sub- 
terranean existence  to  five,  or  at  most,  ten  years,  pro- 

[221  ] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

vided  they  are  not  swept  away  even  before  by  some  ac- 
cident for  which  their  ruthless  employers  are  funda- 
mentally responsible.  They  struck  for  the  usual  ob- 
jectives and  were  met  with  the  usual  high-handed  bru- 
tality that  has  given  such  a  terrible  vividness  to  the 
larger  mining  struggles  in  the  West.  But  let  us  sup- 
pose that  these  workmen  had  struck  not  merely  for 
shorter  hours,  but  also  for  the  establishment  of  a  scien- 
tific institution  for  grappling  with  the  problems  of 
mortality  in  copper  mines,  that  is  for  experimentation 
similar  to  that  through  which  Humphrey  Davy 
alleviated  some  of  the  horrors  of  mine  gases  in  England 
long  ago.  The  proletariat  would  thus  take  a  step  to- 
wards the  role  of  stimulating  scientific  research,  a  very 
homely  step  to  be  sure  and  far  from  the  interests  of 
what  we  think  of  as  the  nobler,  the  freer,  the  more 
speculative  science,  but  a  step  at  least  towards  the  as- 
sumption of  a  favorite  practice  of  retired  capitalists 
who  are  sometimes  glad  to  patronize  sciences  which 
have  no  unpleasant  implications  for  them.  And  if  we 
remember  the  series  of  tragic  experiences  of  great 
scientists  under  modern  capitalism  it  will  hardly  seem 
credible  that  the  workmen  could  be  more  stupid  than 
their  masters  as  the  friends  of  research.  Let  the  biog- 
raphies of  Arkright  and  Watts,  who  made  modern  capi- 
talistic imperialism  possible,  testify  to  the  infamy  of 
those  who  profited.  On  the  contrary,  workmen,  if 

[  222  ] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

they  used  even  a  fair  proportion  of  the  fineness  which 
they  now  often  use  (when  well  organized)  in  the  class- 
war,  would  probably  develop  projects  so  creative  that 
scientists  would  recognize  them  as  closer  kin  than  the 
bourgeois  grown  short-sighted  through  the  influence  of 
possessive  reaction. 

Our  discussion  of  the  general  strike  has  carried  us 
well  into  our  analysis  of  the  "dictatorship  of  the  pro- 
letariat." This  unfortunately  chosen  phrase  has  en- 
abled superstitious  journalists  to  pervert  its  meaning. 
It  is,  of  course,  a  government  of  the  rest  of  society  by 
one  of  its  parts.  But  it  is  unquestionably  the  nearest  to 
majority  government  of  any  regime  that  has  existed. 
And  no  type  of  government  has  ever  been  so  frank  in 
recognizing  its  own  purely  transitional  character. 
Lenin  is  never  tired  of  telling  us  this.  The  red  armies 
of  the  proletarian  dictators  have  actually  come  nearer 
to  bringing  love  onto  the  battlefield  itself  than  any 
other  soldiers  in  history.  Time  and  again  they  have 
surrounded  regiments  of  interventionists  and  could 
have  wiped  them  out,  but  they  have  preferred  to  let 
their  enemies  go  with  exhortations  to  leave  Russia  in 
peace,  to  remember  that  the  workman  of  all  nations  are 
brothers.  Thus  fell  Prussianism  in  Germany.  No 
wonder  the  Prussians  in  other  countries  fill  their  press 
with  terrified  and  hateful  slanders.  No  wonder  that 
violent  plutocrats  fear  Russian  propaganda  far  more 

[223] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

than  they  ever  feared  the  new  German  engines  of  mur- 
der. The  dictatorship  of  the  proletariat  is  also  marked 
by  two  very  significant  progressive  features;  it  is  regu- 
lated by  a  very  flexible  system  of  recall,  and  it  is  a 
government  by  the  youth.  In  the  light  of  Mr.  Trotter's 
recent  demonstration  that  the  chief  menace  to  man's 
endurance  in  nature  is  the  government  by  the  elderly, 
the  "normal,"  a  view  proved  by  the  great  war  and  the 
"peace"  council,  we  may  look  forward  to  a  multiplica- 
tion of  dictatorships  of  the  proletariat  with  more  legiti- 
mate hope  than  fear.  The  dictatorships  of  the  prole- 
tariat in  both  Russia  and  Hungary  have  created  re- 
markable practice  which  will  doubtless  contribute  fun- 
damentally to  the  vexed  problems  of  centralization  and 
decentralization.  Both  these  new  governments  are  ap- 
parently to  grow  in  a  rhythm  of  alternate  centralization 
and  decentralization,  sensitive  to  the  flux  (which  we 
recognize  everywhere  in  life  today)  and  yet  no  longer 
willing  to  drift  helplessly  with  the  flux :  first,  the  plural- 
istic activities  of  the  Congress  of  scattered  Soviets;  then 
the  concentrated  but  short-lived  activities  of  a  Com- 
mittee responsible  to  the  last  Congress  and  the  coming 
Congress;  then  decentralization  once  more  in  a  new 
Congress;  then  centralization  once  more  in  a  new  Com- 
mittee; thus  on  and  on  in  an  ordered  rhythm.  We  may 
well  leave  to  the  Moscow  correspondent  of  The  Man- 
chester Guardian,  Mr.  Phillips  Price,  the  task  of  de- 

[224] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

scribing  the  proletarian  dictatorship  at  its  reconstruc- 
tive work. 

A  guiding  hand  was  necessary  and  that  was  found  in  the  Supreme 
Council  of  Public  Economy.  This  body  came  in  existence  early  in 
January,  1918.  I  well  remember  being  present  at  its  first  meeting. 
A  few  workmen  from  the  Petrograd  and  Moscow  professional  alli- 
ances and  shop-stewards'  committees,  together  with  some  trusted  revo- 
lutionary leaders  and  a  few  technical  advisers  who  were  not  sabotag- 
ing, met  together  on  the  Tuchkof  Naberejnaya  at  Petrograd  with 
the  object  of  organizing  the  economic  life  of  the  republic  in  the 
interests  of  the  toiling  masses.  The  task  before  them  seemed  super- 
human. All  around  them  was  chaos,  produced  by  the  imperialist 
war  and  the  orgy  of  capitalist  profiteering.  Famine,  dearth  of  raw 
materials,  sabotage  of  technical  staffs,  counter-revolutionary  bands 
invading  from  the  South,  Prussian  war  lords  threatening  from  the 
West,  made  the  outlook  apparently  hopeless.  Yet,  nothing  daunted, 
these  brave  workmen,  with  no  experience  except  that  derived  from 
the  hard  school  of  wage-slavery  and  political  oppression,  set  to  work 
to  reconstitute  the  economic  life  of  a  territory  covering  a  large  part 
of  two  continents.  I  saw  them  at  that  meeting  draw  up  plans  for 
the  creation  of  public  departments  which  should  take  over  the  pro- 
duction and  distribution  of  the  "key"  industries,  and  the  transport. 
Their  field  of  vision  ran  from  the  forests  of  Lithuania  to  the  oasis 
of  Central  Asia,  from  the  fisheries  of  the  White  Sea  to  the  oil  fields 
of  the  Caucasus.  As  they  discussed  these  schemes,  one  was  forcibly 
reminded  that  many  of  these  very  places,  for  which  they  were  pre- 
paring their  plans  to  fight  famine  and  re-establish  peaceful  industry, 
were  at  that  moment  threatened  by  counter-revolutionary  forces  and 
by  the  armed  hosts  of  the  European  war  lords,  whose  so-called 
"interests"  demanded  that  famine,  anarchy  and  misery  should  teach 
the  workers  and  peasants  of  Russia  not  to  dare  to  lift  their  hands 

[225] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

against  the  sacred  "rights  of  property."  And  the  wind  howled  'round 
that  cold  stone  building  which  looked  over  the  frozen  Neva,  and  the 
winter  snows  were  driving  down  the  dismal  streets,  but  these  men, 
fired  with  imagination  and  buoyed  up  by  courage,  did  not  waver. 
They  were  planting  an  acorn  which  they  knew  would  one  day  grow 
into  an  oak. 

I  saw  them  five  months  later  at  a  big  conference  in  Moscow. 
The  Supreme  Council  of  Public  Economy  had  now  become  a  great 
state  institution  and  was  holding  its  first  All-Russian  Conference. 
In  every  province  in  Central  Russia  and  in  many  parts  of  the  outer 
marches  local  branches  had  been  formed  and  had  sent  their  repre- 
sentatives. The  first  organ  in  the  world  for  carrying  out  in  prac- 
tice the  theory  that  each  citizen  is  part  of  a  great  human  family 
and  has  rights  in  that  family,  in  so  far  as  he  performs  duties  to  it, 
was  being  visibly  created  before  my  eyes  in  Russia.  In  the  midst 
of  the  clash  of  arms,  the  roar  of  the  imperialist  slaughter  on  the 
battle-fields  of  France,  the  savagery  of  the  civil  war  with  Krasnoff 
on  the  Don  and  with  the  Czecho-Slovaks  on  the  Volga,  the  Supreme 
Council  of  Public  Economy  was  silently  becoming  the  center  of  the 
new  economic  life  of  the  republic.  It  had  been  created  while  the 
more  prominent  political  body,  the  Soviet,  was  struggling  to  pre- 
serve the  existence  of  the  republic  from  enemies  within  and  without. 
The  Supreme  Council  of  Public  Economy  was  the  tool  designed  to 
create  the  new  order  in  Russia;  the  Soviet  was  only  the  temporary 
weapon  to  protect  the  hands  that  worked  that  tool. 

In  tackling  its  problems  not  the  least  difficult  was  the  economic 
separatism  of  the  provinces  and  the  conflict  of  interests  between 
craft  and  industry.  These  problems  hamper  the  labor  movement 
in  every  country  to  a  greater  or  less  degree.  How  often  in  England 
has  the  multiplication  of  craft  unions  in  the  same  industry  or  public 
service  retarded  the  efforts  of  British  labor  to  unite  in  a  common 
policy  for  its  emancipation !  Yet  in  Russia,  the  inexperienced,  untried 

[226] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

proletarian,  freed  from  the  traditions  and  encumbrances  of  an  older, 
more  archaic  social  system  succeeded  in  a  few  weeks  in  rinding  means 
to  reconcile  craft  with  industry.  The  first  Councils  of  Public 
Economy  in  the  provinces  constituted  themselves  out  of  delegates 
sent  by  the  professional  alliances,  to  represent  the  economic  interests 
of  the  workers  organized  in  crafts,  and  an  equal  number  of  dele- 
gates from  the  shop-stewards'  committees  to  represent  the  interests 
of  the  workers  organized  in  industries.  To  them  were  also  added 
delegates  from  the  local  Soviets  to  represent  the  general  political 
interests  of  the  district,  members  of  the  local  Soviet  executives,  which 
included  numerous  departments,  such  as  transport,  produce,  agricul- 
ture, commercial  exchange,  and  also  members  of  the  workers'  co-opera- 
tive societies  and  technical  experts.  The  Supreme  Council  of  Public 
Economy,  also  in  Moscow,  was  formed  from  the  same  elements  in 
their  All-Russian  capacity,  drawn  from  the  All-Russian  Union  of 
Professional  Alliances,  the  All-Russian  Shop-Stewards'  Union,  the 
Central  Soviet  Executive  and  the  People's  Commissariats.  Thus  the 
machinery  was  created  which  enabled  the  interests  of  craft  and 
industry  to  see  common  interests  in  reorganizing  the  productive 
capacity  of  the  country  as  a  whole. 

But  more  important  even  than  the  machinery,  the  spirit  was  there 
which  kept  the  newly  formed  professional  alliances  from  pressing 
craft  claims,  conflicting  with  general  public  interests,  and  which  also 
prevented  the  shop-stewards'  movement  from  running  those  industries 
no  longer  needed  by  the  community.  The  remarkable  degree  of 
co-operation  observed  between  these  two  types  of  labor  organizations 
after  the  October  revolution,  a  degree  of  co-operation  not  hitherto 
seen  in  any  country,  can  of  course  be  attributed  to  the  youth,  one 
might  almost  say  the  immaturity,  of  the  Russian  industrial  system. 
For  the  country  has  only  just  developed  from  a  peasant-serf  state, 
in  which  no  traditions  of  craft  unions  have  accumulated  through  the 
centuries.  Thus  the  removal  of  trade  union  restrictions  on  production 

[227] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

and  of  the  anti-social  power  of  separate  crafts,  which  in  Western  and 
Central  Europe  has  required  an  imperialist  war  and  the  consequent 
flooding  of  the  factories  with  unskilled  labor,  has  been  accomplished 
in  Russia  by  a  much  simpler  process.  TJbere  the  industries  from  the 
first  have  been  largely  supplied  with  the  labor  of  peasants,  just  released 
from  serfdom,  and  consequently  untrained  in  any  craft,  except  per- 
haps in  some  small  domestic  industry,  say  the  textile  or  engineering 
trade,  in  such  a  way  as  to  prevent  each  union  from  being  split  up 
into  a  number  of  smaller  conflicting  craft  unions.  The  Professional 
Alliances  in  the  course  of  1918  in  fact  began  to  organize  themselves 
on  the  basis  of  industries,  leaving  the  shop-stewards'  committees  as 
a  sort  of  local  autonomous  units  of  these  industries,  working  in  close 
contact  with  them. 

In  addition  to  creating  machinery  for  organizing  labor  the  Supreme 
Council  of  Public  Economy  during  the  summer  of  1918  began  to 
tackle  the  problems  of  finance  and  distribution.  It  would  take  too 
long  to  enlarge  upon  these  schemes  fully,  but  I  would  point  out 
that  the  general  idea  was  to  introduce  a  system  of  paying  the  worker 
partly  in  cash  and  partly  in  coupons,  which  he  could  exchange  for 
food.  This  gradually  affected  the  state  finances  by  reducing  the 
need  for  further  currency  issues,  and  it  also  made  possible  the  intro- 
duction of  a  system  of  direct  exchange.  In  order,  therefore,  to  regu- 
late exchange  of  produce  between  town  and  country,  the  whole  urban 
proletariat  and  a  considerable  part  of  the  rural  population  by  the 
autumn  of  1918  were  classified  into  categories  according  to  the  amount 
and  the  intensity  of  the  labor  which  each  individual  performed.  Each 
individual  then  received  food  varying  in  amount  according  to  these 
categories. 

The  machinery  created  for  all  this  was  only  very  gradually  formed, 
r.nd  the  chief  hindrance  to  its  effective  working  was  the  disorders 
created  by  the  German  government  and  by  other  governments,  whose 
agents  on  the  Don,  the  Volga,  in  Archangel  and  Siberia  financed 

[228] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

counter-revolutionary  rebellions,  blew  up  railway  bridges,  cut  off 
food  supplies  and  raw  materials  and  thereby  created  an  anarchy, 
which  caused  infinite  suffering  and  privations  to  the  workers  and 
peasants  of  Central  Russia  throughout  the  greater  part  of  1918. 

Nevertheless  the  Soviet  Government  of  the  Russian  Republic, 
thanks  to  the  discipline  and  political  consciousness  of  its  workers, 
after  removing  social  parasitism  and  economic  wage  slavery,  set  up 
the  economic  apparatus  of  the  first  Socialist  State  that  has  yet  been 
created  in  the  world.  Its  economic  organs,  elected  by  the  workers, 
classed  industrially  and  in  technical  groups,  will  one  day  become  the 
supreme  authority  in  the  Socialist  state.  It  will  be  the  economic 
nerve  center  of  public  life,  and  is  destined  to  replace  parliaments, 
elected  on  territorial  bases  without  any  qualifications  to  deal  with 
problems  of  industry,  transport,  foreign  trade,  finance,  etc.  Parlia- 
ments become  the  easy  prey  to  permanent  executive  departments,  con- 
trolled by  the  propertied  classes.  The  Supreme  Council  of  Public 
Economy  on  the  other  hand  is  a  Socialist  state  which  is  free  from 
the  need  of  defending  itself  from  enemies  without,  combines  legis- 
lative and  executive  functions,  and  concentrates  under  its  control  the 
whole  industrial  and  scientific  apparatus  of  a  modern  state. 

It  now  remains  to  be  seen  how  the  Soviet  Government  dealt  with 
the  third  great  problem  of  the  revolution — the  land.  Measures  for 
stopping  the  war  had  been  taken  the  next  day  after  the  October  revo- 
lution. Shortly  after  that  the  skilled  urban  workers  and  the  half- 
proletariat  began  to  work  their  way  up  through  workers'  control  of 
industry  to  the  creation  of  a  great  state  apparatus  for  the  public 
control  of  production  and  distribution.  Now  came  the  turn  of  the 
peasant.  The  decree  on  the  land  which  was  issued  on  October  28th, 
handed  over  the  great  estates  of  the  landlords,  the  former  Imperial 
family,  the  cabinet  ministers  and  the  Church,  to  provincial  land  com- 
mittees. The  latter  now  came  back  to  the  rights  which  the  Kerensky 
Government  in  the  later  days  of  its  existence  had  robbed  them  of. 

[229] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

It  was  necessary  to  act  speedily.  The  peasants  of  Central  Russia, 
exasperated  at  the  delays  in  dealing  with  the  land  problem  and  know- 
ing that  intrigues  were  being  carried  on  in  Petrograd  to  prevent  the 
land  from  getting  out  of  the  hands  of  the  landlords  and  the  big  banks, 
to  which  much  of  the  land  had  been  mortgaged,  had  begun  to  take 
the  law  into  their  own  hands.  In  several  provinces  the  landlords' 
mansions  were  burned,  the  owners  forced  to  flee,  and  the  agrarian  dis- 
orders threatened  to  ruin  much  agricultural  stock  of  public  value. 
The  decree  on  land,  issued  by  the  Bolshevik  Council  of  the  People's 
Commissaries,  instantly  quieted  the  peasants.  They  knew  that  the 
land  would  indeed  be  theirs  if  the  land  committees,  which  they  con- 
trolled, had  the  handling  of  it. 

But  that  did  not  solve  the  problem.  The  peasants  themselves  had 
no  plan  in  their  minds  of  how  to  deal  with  the  land  when  they  got  it. 
Emancipated  slaves,  who  had  only  just  cast  off  their  chains,  many 
of  them  had  not  yet  learned  to  act  as  men  brought  up  in  the 
atmosphere  of  freedom.  The  older  generation  of  peasants  and  that 
part  of  the  rural  population  which  had  never  been  in  close  contact 
with  the  half-proletariat  or  with  the  urban  skilled  workers,  could 
not  think  beyond  the  boundaries  of  the  parish.  To  them  it  seemed 
that  as  in  the  days  of  Tsarism,  some  beneficient  power  from  above 
had  given  them  the  land.  All  they  wanted  therefore  was  to  divide 
up  the  domain  lands  and  add  the  portions  of  it  to  their  allotments; 
to  take  the  valuable  live  stock  from  the  seigneur's  home-farm  and 
divide  it  equally  among  their  families.  It  did  not  occur  to  them  that 
by  so  doing  they  might  ruin  the  great  dairy  industry,  or  might  reduce 
the  yield  of  cereals  in  the  country  by  breaking  up  cultivation  on  an 
intensive  scale.  They  did  not  see  that  to  grab  all  the  landlords' 
latifundia  (the  second-rate  land  far  away  from  the  mansions)  would 
also  prevent  other  more  needy  peasants  in  provinces,  where  land  was 
scarce,  from  improving  their  condition  by  emigration.  All  these  facts 
were  clear  to  the  Bolshevik  revolutionary  leaders  however,  for  they 

[230] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

at  once  took  steps  to  deal  with  these  elemental  anarchist  tendencies 
of  the  less  politically  conscious  part  of  the  Russian  peasantry,  and 
when  the  third  All-Russian  Congress  of  Soviets  met  in  January,  1918, 
at  once  the  representatives  of  the  rural  district  formed  themselves  into 
a  special  committee  for  working  out  a  fundamental  land  law  for  the 
republic.  For  several  weeks  this  commission  sat  in  the  Smolny  Insti- 
tute and  at  last  produced  the  law,  which  was  passed  by  the  Central 
Soviet  Executive  on  January  22nd,  1918.  The  essential  feature  of 
the  land  law,  which  was  the  keystone  to  the  new  agrarian  order,  was 
contained  in  Articles  i  and  2,  which  read  as  follows:  "All  private 
property  in  land,  minerals,  water,  forests  and  the  forces  of  Nature 
within  the  limits  of  the  Republic  are  abolished  forever,"  and  "the  land 
without  any  compensation  to  the  owners  (open  or  hidden)  becomes 
the  property  of  the  whole  people  to  be  used  for  objects  of  common 
utility."  Thus  at  one  blow  the  monopoly  rights  of  those,  who  held 
the  source  of  all  wealth,  was  swept  away  and  the  Russian  people 
acquired  on  those  fateful  days  of  January,  1918,  what  no  other 
working  population  has  acquired  in  the  world  before — free  access  to 
the  land.  Moreover,  the  process  was  extremely  simple.  It  was  only 
necessary  to  declare  all  land  public  property,  and  at  once  all  the 
latifundia  of  the  landlords,  Imperial  family,  ministers  and  Church 
were  automatically  added  to  the  miserable  allotments  which  the 
peasants  had  received  on  emancipation;  while  the  territorially  small 
but  economically  important  lands  of  the  intensively  cultivated  domains 
were  easily  picked  out,  withheld  from  distribution  among  the  peasants 
and  reserved  for  public  development  schemes.  The  Russian  land  law 
of  January,  1918,  realized  in  practice  what  Mr.  Lloyd  George  in 
England,  in  the  years  just  preceding  the  war,  tinkered  at,  but  had 
not  the  courage  to  carry  out.  For  by  the  Russian  method  there  was 
no  undeveloped  land  tax  and  unearned  increment  tax  at  a  modest 
one  to  ten  per  cent.  The  Soviet  Government  took  the  bull  by  the 
horns  and  by  a  simple  hundred  per  cent,  tax  put  an  end  to  all  profit- 

[231  ] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

making  in  land  at  the  public  expense.  Thus  the  Russian  peasants 
were  freed  from  the  luxury  of  maintaining  landlords,  even  in  a  form 
tamed  and  chastened  by  taxation.  In  other  words,  landlords  as  a 
social  and  economic  factor  simply  ceased  to  exist. 

Nor  had  the  landlords  any  reason  to  be  anything  but  thankful  to 
the  Bolsheviks,  since  all  through  the  summer  of  1917,  while  Kerensky's 
government  was  vacillating,  they  were  being  threatened  with  pogroms 
and  massacre  by  the  morose  and  sullen  peasantry.  The  land  law 
enabled  them  quietly  to  disappear  from  the  scene  in  an  orderly  legal 
manner.  Nor  were  they  cruelly  treated  by  the  law.  They  had  the 
right  to  apply  through  the  provincial  land  committees  of  the  Peasants' 
Soviets  for  that  amount  of  their  former  land,  which  they  were  capable 
of  working  with  their  own  labor.  If  any  landlord  was  old,  infirm, 
or  unable  for  any  reason  to  work,  he  was  under  Article  8,  Section  I, 
given  the  right  "to  receive  a  pension  on  the  scale  of  that  granted 
to  a  disabled  soldier."  Thus  the  libels,  circulated  outside  Russia  that 
the  Soviet  Government  threw  out  the  landlords  from  their  mansions 
to  starve,  is  seen  on  examination  of  the  facts  to  be  false.  In  those 
places  where  outrages  did  occur,  they  were  due  to  peasantry,  who, 
as  a  result  of  excessive  exasperation,  had  got  out  of  hand  and  dis- 
obeyed the  Bolshevik  government  authorities,  or  else  they  were  due 
to  provocative  acts  on  the  part  of  the  landlords  themselves. 

Now,  what  was  the  system,  which  the  new  land  law  established 
for  the  distribution  of  land  among  the  peasants?  It  was  easy  to 
break  up  estates  but  difficult  to  create  a  new  agrarian  system,  which 
would  not  lower  agricultural  productivity  and  thus  intensify  the 
famine.  Under  Section  2  of  the  land  law  a  scheme  was  drawn  up 
which  provided  for  the  order,  in  which  land  allotments  should  be 
made.  First  in  the  scale  came  the  state  land  departments,  local  and 
central,  and  public  organizations  working  under  their  control.  They 
were  to  be  the  first  to  have  the  right  to  withhold  land  from  distri- 
bution among  the  peasants,  in  order  to  open  experimental  stations, 

[232] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

intensive  cultivation  farms,  or  to  run  the  domain  homesteads  for 
purposes  of  general  public  utility.  Next  in  order  came  private  societies 
and  associations,  and  here  preference  was  given  to  the  "labor  com- 
mune," i.  e.,  to  groups  of  peasants  or  urban  workers'  families  who 
should  agree  to  work  with  common  live  stock  and  by  common  labor 
a  given  tract  of  land,  to  divide  the  products  for  their  families  and 
the  profits  from  their  sales  in  common.  These  new  forms  of  com- 
munes were  really  large  farms,  organized  on  a  co-operative  basis, 
both  for  production  and  consumption.  They  were  admirably  suited 
for  the  work  of  taking  over  the  landlords'  domains  and  the  home 
farms  and  for  providing,  under  control  of  the  state  food  department, 
the  necessary  agricultural  produce  for  the  urban  population.  Next 
in  order  came  the  old  Russian  peasant  commune,  which  could,  after 
the  former  categories  had  been  satisfied,  receive  additions  to  the  old 
allotments,  which  had  been  parcelled  out  in  1861.  This  old  type  of 
commune  represents  a  much  more  archaic  system  of  husbandry — a  sys- 
tem under  which  the  land  is  divided  equally,  but  each  family  main- 
tains its  separate  stock  and  farms  independent  of  its  neighbors.  It  has 
the  disadvantage  of  splitting  up  the  land  into  small  isolated  patches 
with  the  object  of  preventing  any  member  of  the  commune  from 
obtaining  advantage  over  another  member.  It  has  none  of  the  advan- 
tages of  a  common  system  of  husbandry.  The  new  land  law  thus 
did  everything  to  encourage  the  new  type  of  commune  and  to  dis- 
courage the  old.  During  the  course  of  the  summer  of  1918  many 
hundreds  of  the  new  type  were  created  in  the  central  provinces  by 
soldiers  and  sailors  discharged  from  the  old  army,  by  skilled  urban 
workers  who,  as  a  result  of  the  famine  in  industrial  raw  products, 
had  been  thrown  out  of  work,  and  by  the  half-peasant-half-proletarian, 
who  had  insufficient  land  allotments  and  who,  during  the  war,  had 
lost  his  live  stock  and  the  means  to  cultivate  on  his  own. 

From  the  first,  therefore,  it  was  clear  to  the  leaders  of  the  revo- 
lution that  a  change  in  the  system  of  land  tenure  must  be  accom- 

[233] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

panied  by  a  complete  change  in  the  system  of  husbandry.  In  the  years 
before  the  war  the  average  yield  of  a  dessatine  of  land  in  Russia 
was  52  poods  for  wheat  and  61  poods  for  oats.  In  Germany  the 
same  area  of  land  yielded  137  poods  of  wheat  and  141  poods  of 
oats.  The  average  productive  capacity  of  one  Russian  rural  inhabi- 
tant was  many  times  lower  than  that  of  an  urban  inhabitant.  The 
latter  numbering  4  millions  at  the  commencement  of  1915  produced 
annually  between  7  and  8  milliard  roubles'  worth  of  industrial  prod- 
ucts, i.  e.,  each  urban  inhabitant  produced  3,000  roubles'  worth. 
The  130  million  rural  workers,  on  the  other  hand,  produced  annually 
10  milliard  roubles'  worth  of  produce,  i.  e.,  125  roubles'  worth  each. 
The  most  intensive  production  was  carried  out  on  the  domains  of 
the  great  estates  and  from  them  a  large  portion  of  the  produce  was 
exported  abroad,  did  not  reach  the  Russian  consumer,  and  the  profits 
on  its  sale  went  into  the  hands  of  a  small  aristocratic  clique.  The 
young  Russian  Republic  of  Labor  coming  into  possession  of  these 
domains,  and  being  faced  with  the  necessity  of  increasing  produc- 
tion, determined  to  accomplish  this  end  by  encouraging  the  new  form 
of  labor  commune  among  the  peasantry  and  half-proletariat.  Again 
the  problem  of  carrying  through  the  agrarian  revolution  was  greatly 
assisted  by  the  peculiar  conditions  of  Russian  society.  In  the  absence 
of  highly  developed  farming  and  of  a  system  of  agricultural  capi- 
talism, it  was  not  necessary  first  to  break  down,  as  it  is  in  Western 
and  Central  Europe,  the  thousands  of  private  interests,  yeoman  free- 
holders, and  the  interests  of  private  land  development  syndicates. 
It  was  only  necessary  to  remove  the  effete  agrarian  aristocracy  and 
then  to  keep  within  bounds  the  anarchical  instincts  of  the  less  edu- 
cated peasantry.  In  this  task  the  leaders  of  the  revolution  were 
assisted  by  the  fact  that  in  Russian  society  there  exists,  as  I  have 
mentioned  above,  a  numerous  element  of  unskilled  workers,  who  have 
not  lost  touch  with  the  village  and  who  thus  become  the  link  between 
town  and  country.  This  half-peasant-half-proletarian  became  the 

[234] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

advance  guard  of  the  revolutionary  army,  educating  the  backward 
peasantry  in  the  remote  rural  districts  during  the  summer  of  1918. 
But  the  conditions  under  which  this  task  was  attempted  seemed 
almost  hopeless.  When  the  Germans  and  General  Krasnoff  had  cut 
off  the  food  supplies  from  the  Don  and  the  Ukraine,  when  the 
Czecho-Slovaks  had  cut  the  great  commercial  artery  of  the  Volga, 
and  the  "Allies"  had  closed  the  window  to  the  west  at  Murman, 
when  in  fact  the  economic  outlook  of  Soviet  Russia,  surrounded  by 
imperialist  enemies  on  every  side,  seemed  blackest,  the  Central  Soviet 
Executive,  nothing  daunted,  began  the  work  of  slowly,  laboriously 
building  up,  the  new  social  order  in  the  villages.  I  was  present  in 
June  at  a  conference  of  the  Central  Soviet  Executive  and  the  All- 
Russian  Professional  Alliances  in  Moscow  just  at  the  darkest  hour, 
when  all  seemed  lost.  It  would  have  almost  seemed  better  to  those, 
who  had  not  the  heart  of  lions,  to  confess  that  the  revolution  was 
a  failure  and  to  let  the  proletariat  of  Russia  put  back  its  neck 
beneath  the  yoke  of  the  agrarian  aristocracy,  of  "financial  capital" 
and  the  foreign  concessionaries.  But  the  workingmen  of  Moscow 
and  Petrograd  had  indeed  the  heart  of  lions.  They  were  already 
isolated  by  the  Governments  of  the  whole  world  and  now  at  the 
risk  of  arousing  against  them  their  own  peasantry,  who  did  not 
understand  the  meaning  of  the  agrarian  revolution,  they  decided  to 
create  in  each  rural  district  "committees  of  the  poorer  peasantry," 
which  should  stop  the  more  well-to-do  elements  of  the  rural  popu- 
lation from  anarchically  breaking  up  the  great  estates  among  them- 
selves and  from  plundering  the  domain  farms ;  which  should  organize 
the  new  type  of  communes  and  should  teach  the  peasantry  in  the 
hard  school  of  discipline  that  they  had  responsibilities  to  the  revolu- 
tion as  well  as  privileges.  At  first  these  committees  of  the  poorer 
peasantry  met  with  resistance  in  the  villages.  Rebellions  against  the 
Republic  broke  out  in  many  districts  and  were  fomented  by  the  agents 
of  the  German  government  and  other  governments,  as  the  documents 

[235] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

published  by  the  Extraordinary  Commission  for  the  Fight  with  the 
Counter-revolution  proves.  Just  as  the  Vendee  and  the  Champagne 
revolted  against  the  proletariat  and  the  small  bourgeoisie  of  Paris  in 
the  French  Revolution  and  were  aided  by  a  British  naval  expedition, 
which  blockaded  the  French  coast  in  the  interests  of  the  "real  France," 
so  now  the  wealthy  and  ignorant  part  of  the  Russian  peasantry  struck 
against  the  urban  workers  and  the  half-proletariat  and  were  assisted 
by  the  ruling  classes  of  England,  who  proved  true  once  more  to  their 
traditions  as  suppressors  of  all  movements  for  freedom  in  Europe, 
by  conspiring  to  overthrow  the  popular  movement  in  Russia.  But  the 
peasant  revolts  in  the  central  provinces  were  put  down  by  the  Soviet 
Government.  Stern  revolutionary  discipline  was  enforced  and  the 
saying  of  Mirabeau  was  confirmed:  "Angels  are  not  made  out  of 
butter  in  time  of  revolution." 

What  were  the  Committees  of  the  Poorer  Peasantry?  They 
consisted  for  the  most  part  of  that  social  element,  referred  to  above, — 
the  half-proletarian,  half-peasant  class.  This  class  had  suffered  very 
severely  from  the  war.  Having  been  employed  in  unskilled  work 
in  towns  for  part  of  the  year  and  having  had  no  special  qualifications, 
which  enabled  them  to  find  work  in  the  rear,  they  were  driven  by 
thousands  into  the  Tsar's  army  at  the  crack  of  the  gendarmes'  whip. 
Those,  who  returned,  found  industries  requiring  only  the  half  num- 
ber of  hands  that  were  employed  before,  while  in  the  villages  the 
allotments,  which  they  cultivated  every  spring  and  summer,  had 
for  four  years  either  been  left  untouched  and  had  gone  to  waste 
or  else  had  been  taken  by  someone  else,  who  could  not  now  be  ousted. 
The  position  of  most  of  them  was  very  tragic,  but  they  readily  accepted 
the  idea  of  forming  labor  communes  to  re-establish  their  ruined  hus- 
bandry on  the  land.  To  this  element,  therefore,  the  revolutionary 
leaders  now  turned  to  organize  the  "committees  of  the  poorer 
peasantry."  Little  by  little  during  the  summer  of  1918  these  com- 
mittees grew  in  the  western  and  central  provinces.  They  got  their 

[236] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

members  elected  to  the  local  Soviets,  removed  speculators  and  the 
rich  farmer  element,  that  had  crept  into  them,  took  over  the  admin- 
istration of  the  corn  requisitioning  and  began  to  establish  the  new 
labor  communes.  This  work  soon  began  to  bear  fruit.  By  September 
requisitioned  food  began  to  come  to  the  starving  towns,  and  nearly 
500  of  the  new  communes  were  registered  with  the  Commissariat 
of  Agriculture.  It  was  found  that  a  slow  but  radical  improvement 
in  the  system  of  husbandry  and  in  the  productivity  of  the  land  was 
beginning.  In  one  place  in  the  Tula  province  figures  were  worked 
out,  which  showed  that  under  the  old  form  of  commune  50  persons, 
cultivating  a  hundred  dessatines  of  land,  working  independently 
of  each  other,  required  40  horses  and  twelve  ploughs.  Under  the 
new  form  of  commune,  in  which  each  individual  worked  as  a  mem- 
ber of  the  whole,  only  twenty  horses  and  five  ploughs  were  needed. 
Thus  the  saving  of  time  and  expense  enabled  more  capital  to  be 
laid  out  in  improvements,  which  in  turn  increased  productivity. 

It  is  possible  to  go  on  describing  without  end  the  new  social 
perspectives  that  have  opened  out  before  the  rural  and  urban  popu- 
lation of  Russia  as  the  result  of  the  land  and  industrial  laws,  passed 
by  the  government  of  the  Soviet  Republic.  All  this  constructive 
social  work,  the  greatest  and  most  daring  of  its  kind,  ever  yet 
attempted  in  the  history  of  the  world,  requires  to  be  written  not 
in  a  pamphlet  but  in  a  book — nay,  in  many  books.  And,  let  it  be 
remembered,  all  this  is  going  on  now,  as  I  write  these  lines,  in  spite 
of  the  thunder  of  the  revolutionary  war,  in  which  the  Red  Army 
of  the  Russian  workmen  and  peasants  is  defending  its  Labor  Republic 
against  the  attacks  upon  it  from  without  by  the  armed  hirelings  of 
the  London,  Berlin,  Paris  and  New  York  stock  exchanges.  But 
enough  has  been  written  to  show  that  what  is  going  on  in  Russia 
today  is  not  the  work  of  a  mob  of  madmen  or  of  a  gang  of  robbers. 
The  robbers  are  they,  who  have  been  for  years  under  Tsarism  sucking 
the  life-blood  of  the  Russian  working  class  and  the  peasantry,  con- 

[237] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

verting  them  into  slaves  to  maintain  the  exploitation  profits  of  syndi- 
cates in  the  "City"  and  Wall  Street.  The  madmen  are  they,  who 
think  that  they  can,  by  overthrowing  the  government  of  the  Soviet 
Republic  through  punitive  expeditions,  reimpose  the  yoke  of  financial 
capital  upon  the  Russian  workers  and  peasants.  Madmen,  I  say, 
for  is  it  likely,  even  if  these  expeditions  should  succeed,  that  the 
Russian  people  can  be  permanently  reduced  to  slavery  once  more? 
Slavery  means  that  the  subjected  person  must  either  by  superior  force 
or  by  cajolery  be  made  to  obey  and  work  for  his  master.  Can  this 
force  be  permanently  applied  to  hold  down  180  million  people?  Can 
they  be  cajoled  to  put  their  necks  under  the  yoke  again  ?  The  Russian 
workman  and  peasant  has  known  for  the  first  time  in  his  history 
what  it  is  to  be  a  free  man  and  he  can  say:  "I  am  no  longer  a 
slave,  civis  Romanus  sum." 

Those  who  have  experimented  with  a  "dictatorship 
of  the  proletariat"  are  the  nearest  of  all  to  that  ideal 
which  Doctor  Ananda  Coomaraswamy  has  so  beauti- 
fully articulated  in  The  Dance  of  Siva,  the  ideal  of  the 
Utopian  anarchist,  far  distant,  it  is  to  be  admitted,  but  so 
much  purer  than  any  other  ideal  and  so  inevitably  the 
goal  of  all  men  that  we  cannot  do  better  than  to  close 
our  whole  discussion  of  economic  and  politics  with  his 
words.  When  one  learns  of  the  meager  salaries  on 
which  the  Russian  and  Hungarian  leaders  insist  on  liv- 
ing, when  one  sees  in  general  their  spirit  of  self-efface- 
ment, when  one  reads  of  their  readiness  to  give  way  be- 
fore each  really  creative  autonomous  manifestation  by 
the  most  provincial  Soviets  or  the  lowliest  individual, 
one  sees  how  profoundly  the  proletarian  leaders  of  the 

[238] 


THE  CLASS  STRUGGLE  AND  FRATERNITY 

new  society  govern  by  renouncing  that  feverish  will  to 
govern  which  has  corrupted  practically  all  other  states- 
men past  and  present.  After  gathering  in  a  spacious 
synthetic  vision  elements  from  Nietzsche  and  Shakes- 
peare, from  the  dances,  the  poetry,  the  painting,  the 
love-lore  of  ancient  India,  from  the  Indian  guild  sys- 
tem, from  French  syndicalism  and  British  guild  social- 
ism, Doctor  Coomaraswamy  concludes  with  some  pro- 
found remarks  on  the  "will  to  govern."  He  finds  the 
rule  of  one  person  tyrannous.  And  he  finds  the  rule  of 
the  majority  tyrannous.  He  brands  "the  anarchy  ap- 
proached by  self-assertion"  as  "chaos."  He  reposes  in 
the  following  invincible  truth : 

"The  anarchy  approached  by  renunciation  is  ...  an  anarchy  of 
spontaneity:  only  the  renunciation  of  the  will  to  govern  could  create 
a  stable  equilibrium.  .  .  .  The  'will  to  govern'  must  not  be  confused 
with  the  'will  to  power.'  The  will  to  govern  men  is  the  will  to  gov- 
ern others :  the  will  to  power  is  the  will  to  govern  one's  self.  Those 
who  would  be  free  should  have  the  will  to  power  without  the  will 
to  govern." 


[239] 


VIII. 
EDUCATION; 

A    PROGRAM    FOR   THE   AMERICAN 
UNIVERSITY 

We  may  now  sum  up  our  long  analysis  of  the  rela- 
tions between  the  facts  of  the  class  struggle  and  the  facts 
which  point  towards  fraternity.  Dynamic  psychology, 
with  its  emphasis  on  the  total  behavior  of  the  individ- 
ual and  with  its  insistence  that  the  difference  between 
the  "sane"  and  the  "insane"  is  merely  one  of  degree, 
has  revolutionized  economics  and  politics  for  those  who 
have  eyes  to  see  and  ears  to  hear.  The  "self-interest 
psychology"  is  no  longer  tenable,  and  with  its  fall  con- 
servative economics  and  monistic  politics  are  absolutely 
destroyed.  But  Marxian  economics  can  survive  with 
a  leaven  of  anarchist  utopianism.  For  recent  behav- 
ioristic  and  psychoanalytic  investigations  restore  a  good 
portion  of  the  utopist's  belief  that  the  most  fundamental 
feature  of  man's  original  nature  is  his  wish  to  love  his 
fellows,  that  fear,  hate,  and  the  possessive  impulses  are 
vicarious,  and  that  therefore  the  fundamental  forces  in 
a  successful  revolution  must  always  be  the  love  of  our 
fellows  and  a  sense  of  growing  freedom.  Now,  while 
Marx  often  appears  to  put  all  the  emphasis  on  the 

[240] 


EDUCATION 


determining  influence  of  the  tool  of  production,  on  the 
self-interest  of  the  individual  and  on  class-hatred,  his 
intuition  was  sounder  than  his  dialectic.  For  again  and 
again  he  appealed  to  men's  growing  sense  of  freedom, 
their  generous  impulses  and  their  feeling  of  universal 
brotherhood.  Orthodox  economists  have  used  this  in- 
consistency to  condemn  him  for  confusing  economics 
and  ethics.  But  modern  psychology,  the  study  of  the 
behavior  of  the  individual  as  a  whole,  and  the  most 
recent  logic  of  science  have  demonstrated  that  you  can- 
not separate  economics  and  ethics.  Marx,  therefore, 
survives  while  orthodox  economics  falls  through  its 
complete  dependence  on  that  delusive  influence  which 
psychoanalysts  call  the  ego-complex.  Marxian  empha- 
sis on  the  right  of  all  men  to  the  "surplus  value"  is 
really  an  emphasis  on  the  "human  valuation"  which 
modern  psychology  forces  upon  us.  And  the  militant 
proletariat  goes  with  Marx  and  with  contemporary 
radical  intellectuals  in  placing  the  sanctity  of  human 
life  above  the  sanctity  of  property.  Radical  laborers 
are  therefore  more  contemporaneously  scientific  than 
capitalists.  And  labor  unions  are  the  vast  laboratories 
of  the  first  really  vital  sociology.  In  the  field  of  poli- 
tics militant  laborers  and  radical  intellectuals  alike  are 
reconceiving  the  State  as  properly  nothing  but  an  asso- 
ciation of  consumers  no  more  powerful  by  right  than  a 
congress  of  organized  producers.  In  the  light  of  mod- 

[240 


THE  .INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

ern  psychology  our  political  theory  must  be  pluralistic 
and  political  institutions,  like  all  institutions,  must  be 
judged  by  their  consequences  in  contrast  to  human  per- 
sonalities whom  we  can  understand  completely  only 
through  a  knowledge  of  their  motives.  We  must  work 
towards  a  delicate  balance  of  governmental  powers 
which  will  elevate  the  autonomy  of  the  individual  above 
the  power  of  the  State  or  any  other  institution.  Sound 
sovereignty  can  rest  on  nothing  but  consent.  At  pres- 
ent, in  the  class  struggle  which  is  being  waged  for  the 
complete  release  of  love,  honest  intellectuals  and  syndi- 
calistic workers  alike  find  that  economic  power  pre- 
cedes political  power.  And  always  it  will  be  true  that 
really  spiritual  politics  can  rest  only  on  healthy  eco- 
nomics. In  the  class-struggle  it  also  becomes  increas- 
ingly apparent  that  the  proletariat  grows  ever  more 
humane,  the  bourgeoisie  more  brutal.  The  bourgeoisie 
or  "segregated  class"  is  so  blinded  by  its  property-com- 
plexes that  its  wish  to  love  is  overwhelmed  by  a  vicar- 
ious fear  and  hate.  Capitalistic  sabotage  begins  with 
the  hoarding  and  destruction  of  productions  and  reaches 
a  climax  in  the  present  unspeakable  attempt  to  starve 
Central  Europe  into  an  acceptance  of  a  dying  plutoc- 
racy. Proletarian  sabotage  begins  with  injury  to  ma- 
chinery and  reaches  a  climax  in  truth-telling,  artistic 
workmanship  and  obedience  to  laws.  General  strikes 
abound  in  sublime  instances  of  the  release  of  love  and 

[242] 


EDUCATION 


magnanimity.  The  dictatorship  of  the  proletariat  is  the 
first  type  of  government  honest  enough  to  admit  itself 
to  be  transitional  and  not  eternal.  It  is  the  first  govern- 
ment in  which  the  leaders  are  generally  notable  for 
their  spirit  of  renunciation.  Never  before  has  the 
world  seen  such  a  galaxy  of  self-effacing  statesmen  as 
Lenine  and  Trotsky,  Tchicherin,  Lunartcharsky,  Kol- 
lontay  and  many  more.  The  dictatorship  of  the  prole- 
tariat is  the  first  government  thoroughly  sensitive  to  the 
rhythm  of  centralization  and  decentralization  which  is 
a  rhythm  of  life  but  which  other  governments  try  to 
coerce  and  to  fix  artificially  in  one  mould  or  the  other. 
It  is  a  government  of  healthy  young  men  not  of  elderly 
paranoiacs.  Thus  radical  intellectuals  and  militant 
proletarians  come  together  in  the  recognition  that  "the 
will  to  power  is  the  will  to  govern  one's  self"  and  that 
progress  is  sure  only  when  its  force  is  our  fundamental 
wish  to  love.  This  is  not  to  sentimentalize.  For  we 
discover  and  set  free  our  wish  to  love  only  by  facing 
unflinchingly  our  innumerable  vicarious  uglinesses  and 
pettinesses  which  are  branded  deeply  into  us.  It  is  such 
relentless  self-scrutiny  that  makes  illustrious  the  Rus- 
sian novelists  and  the  psychoanalysts.  It  is  such  re- 
lentless self-scrutiny  that  is  beginning  to  set  free  many 
other  intellectuals  and  the  proletariat  of  the  plutocratic 
countries. 

We  may  perfect  our  transition  to  our  final  topic, 

[243] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

education,  particularly  that  conceivable  American  uni- 
versity education  which  might  perfect  the  entente  of 
intellectuals  and  wage-workers,  by  supplementing 
Doctor  Coomaraswamy's  political  reflections  with  some 
beautifully  congruous  educational  reflections  by  John 
Henry  Newman: 

"Taking  Influence  and  Law  to  be  the  two  great  principles  of  Gov- 
ernment, it  is  plain  that,  historically  speaking,  Influence  comes  first, 
and  then  Law.  Thus  Orpheus  preceded  Lycurgus  and  Solon.  Thus 
Deioces  the  Mede  laid  the  foundations  of  his  power  in  his  personal 
reputation  for  justice,  and  then  established  it  in  the  seven  walls  by 
which  he  surrounded  himself  in  Ecbatana.  First  we  have  the  Virum 
pietatc  gravem'  whose  word  rules  th?  spirits  and  soothes  tha  breasts' 
of  the  multitude; — or  the  warriors; — or  the  mythologist  and  bard; 
— then  follow  at  length  the  dynasty  and  constitution.  Such  is  the 
history  of  society:  it  begins  in  the  poet,  and  ends  in  the  policeman." 

The  faint  irony  of  the  last  sentence  adumbrates  the 
half-troubled  favoritism  which  Cardinal  Newman,  in 
his  long  meditation  on  the  world-old  antinomy  of  dis- 
cipline (law)  and  influence  (interest)  lent  to  the  latter. 
The  problem  arouses  some  of  the  most  enriching  con- 
troversy today.  In  contemporary  education  we  may 
survey  it  thus:  interest  has  made  real  strides  under  the 
guidance  of  a  Rousseau,  a  Froebel,  a  Charles  William 
Eliot,  a  Francisco  Ferrer;  it  is  not  so  much  that  we 
have  an  excess  of  interest  as  that  we  have  a  twentieth 
century  interest  coupled  with  occasional  spasmodic  and 
moribund  revivals  or  reactions  of  a  discipline  tainted 

[244] 


EDUCATION 


with  fear,  discipline  that  calls  upon  the  teacher  to  be 
a  special  dispensating  Providence,  discipline  that  com- 
pels the  teaching  of  a  history  perversely  idealized  to 
confirm  an  uncritical  allegiance  to  the  present  ruling 
class  and  a  blind  idolatory  of  the  nation  into  which  you 
happen  to  be  born,  discipline  which  has  so  mishandled 
the  ancient  classics  that  they  must  lie  fallow  till  new 
loving  guardians  can  devise  new  ways  of  fitting  them 
into  a  curriculum  based  on  genuinely  democratic  as- 
pirations, discipline  which  in  the  present  growth  of 
militarism,  imperialism,  and  bureaucracy  menaces  the 
progress  of  the  world  for  generations.  But  all  this  is 
not  worthy  of  the  name  of  discipline;  it  is  pseudo-dis- 
cipline as  we  shall  see. 

We  can  define  a  liberal  education  for  our  day  only 
by  freeing  ourselves  first  from  an  unholy  alliance  con- 
sisting of  philosophical  idealists  of  the  more  exotic  type 
(who  believe  in  philosophy  for  philosophy's  sake), 
from  certain  educational  advocates  of  the  classics  (who 
believe  in  education  for  education's  sake)  from  the 
esthetic  parasites  (who  believe  in  "art"  for  "art's" 
sake,  i.e.,  in  art  for  luxury's  sake),  from  degenerate 
descendants  of  the  Puritans  (who  believe  in  drudgery 
for  drudgery's  sake),  and  from  the  imperialistic  capi- 
talists (who  believe  in  business-power  for  business- 
power's  sake).  It  may  sound  absurd,  at  first  blush,  to 
group  these  together.  We  owe  many  blessings  to 

[245] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

philosophical  idealists  and  to  classical  educationalists. 
And  certainly  these  two  groups  are  inclined,  in  a  pure- 
ly theoretical  way,  to  express  their  abhorrence  of 
esthetic  parasites  and  imperialistic  capitalists.  There 
are  undoubtedly  logical  incongruities  which  make 
perfect  harmony  impossible  in  the  unholy  alliance. 
Philosophical  idealists,  for  instance,  are  often  found 
with  the  petit  bourgeoisie  rather  than  with  the  larger 
capitalists  and  they  like  to  dub  themselves  "liberals," 
"progressives,"  or  even  "socialists"  (of  the  Fabian 
variety)  but  the  net  result  is  that  they  are  timid 
weathercocks  who  flutter  alternately  to  the  strong  north- 
easters of  the  revolutionists  and  the  blasting  siroccos  of 
the  reactionaries.  And  it  is  a  historical  fact  of  our 
period  that  those  who  believe  in  philosophy  for 
philosophy's  sake,  those  who  believe  in  education  for 
education's  sake,  those  who  believed  in  drudgery  for 
drudgery's  sake,  and  those  who  believe  in  business- 
power  for  business-power's  sake  are  actually  working  in 
concert  on  some  of  the  most  momentous  issues  of  today. 
The  purpose  of  the  education  of  "culture"  today  is 
to  create  in  the  universities  and  colleges  a  small  group 
of  men  euphemistically  denominated  "leaders  in 
service,"  whose  "canons"  of  living  are,  as  Professor 
Veblen  has  shown  us,  "conspicuous  leisure"  and  "con- 
spicuous waste"  and,  far  too  often,  "pecuniary  emula- 
tion." There  is  no  need  to  dwell  here  on  the  sinister 


EDUCATION 


influence  of  endowments  upon  universities.  Nor  need 
we  dwell  on  the  analogous  situation  of  the  artist.  To 
little  purpose,  as  yet,  did  Doctor  Johnson  say:  "Is  not  a 
patron,  my  lord,  one  who  looks  with  unconcern  on  a 
man  struggling  for  life  in  the  water,  and  when  he  has 
reached  ground,  encumbers  him  with  help?" 

What,  then,  is  a  really  contemporaneous  and  pro- 
gressive "liberal  education"?  Assuredly  we  cannot  say 
that  it  is  a  sovereignty  of  Latin  and  Greek  poetry  and 
prose  and  then  avow  ourselves  to  be  disciples  of  Plato. 
For  Plato,  the  supreme  subjects  were  mathematics  and 
philosophy  and  he  banished  poets  (at  least  some  poets) 
from  his  Republic.  But  no  Platonist  today  would  re- 
ject poetry  in  education  and  few  would  insist  upon  a 
pedagogical  hegemony  of  mathematics  and  philosophy. 
Obviously  we  are  all  agreed,  from  Plato  to  Professor 
Paul  Shorey,  that  a  liberal  education  is  one  which  gives 
us  a  synoptic  view.  But  in  order  to  define  liberal  edu- 
cation for  our  age  we  must  ask  the  question:  how 
today  are  we  to  acquire  and  disseminate  a  synoptic 
view?  It  is  just  here  that  the  humanistic  and  idealistic 
abstractions  prove  as  little  help  to  us  as  the  fading  grin 
of  the  Cheshire  cat.  The  choice  of  studies  which  will 
give  the  synoptic  view  depends  upon  the  period  in  the 
world's  history,  the  particular  environment  in  which 
we  find  ourselves  and  the  complexes  which  the  students 
have  (assuming  the  teacher,  as  all  teachers  in  due  time 

[247] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

will  want  to  be,  has  been  psychoanalyzed) .  The  studies 
must  be  chosen  by  a  careful  experimental  procedure  co- 
operatively conducted  by  teacher  and  pupil  because 
human  beings  are  individuals  and  not  types  and  it  is 
quite  impossible  to  speak  of  any  studies  as  the  best 
studies  for  everybody. 

Our  liberal  education  will  not  fear  play.  Play  is  the 
essence  of  religion  and  art.  It  is  one  of  history's  most 
recent  ironies  that  while  self-styled  humanists  have 
been  accusing  various  pioneer  educationalists  of  utili- 
tarianism these  "utilitarians"  have  been  achieving  the 
marriage  of  education  and  play.  Work,  properly  con- 
ceived, is  not  the  antithesis  of  play;  work,  as  Mr. 
Joseph  Lee  has  shown,  is  the  fulfillment  of  play.  It  is 
the  failure  to  perceive  this  that  trapped  the  educational 
reactionaries  into  sterilizing  the  classics  for  a  genera- 
tion because  they  thought  that  the  dignity  of  Greek  and 
Latin  literatures  required  what  they  called  discipline 
and  because  by  discipline  they  meant  little  beyond 
drudgery.  It  is  the  failure  to  perceive  that  work  is  the 
fulfillment  of  play  which  keeps  the  art  for  art's  sake 
practitioner  in  the  category  of  minor  poet  since  he  al- 
ways persists  in  playing  an  infantile  game  and  in  re- 
fusing to  work  or  to  believe  work  and  joy  compatible. 

Business  men  have  learned  to  look  with  suspicion 
upon  exponents  of  the  older  humanities  in  education 
because  business-men  are  proponents  of  that  logically 

[  248  ] . 


EDUCATION 


and  psychologically  meaningless  doctrine,  "Deeds,  not 
words."  But  the  teachers  of  the  older  humanities  have 
taught  words  so  pedantically  hot-housed  from  deeds, 
and  their  education  towards  gentlemanly  leisure  has  in- 
volved so  much  drudgery  in  its  process  that  the  pupils 
have  allied  themselves  with  the  business-men. 

By  contrast  with  both  conservative  educationalists 
and  efficiency-made  business-men  those  who  tend  to 
advocate  an  adaptation  to  a  remote  end  by  the  use  of  a 
great  variety  of  means  rationally  chosen  are  the  liberal 
educators  who  give  play  its  fulfillment  in  work.  Such 
an  education  is  almost  unknown  among  university 
teachers.  But  it  has  been  worked  out  elaborately  for 
children  in  various  places,  in  the  Gary  'Schools,  for 
example,  which  Mr.  Randolphe  Bourne  so  charmingly 
described,  with  their  "class-rooms,  .  .  .  playgrounds 
and  gardens,  gymnasiums  and  swimming  pools,  special 
drawing  and  music  studios,  scientific  laboratories, 
machine  shops  and  intimate  and  constant  contact  with 
supplementary  community  activities  outside  the 
school,"  making  "the  playground  the  very  centre  of  its 
life,  'eager'  to  absorb  the  museums  and  galleries" 
since  "the  artistic  sense  can  be  cultivated  only  by  bring- 
ing children  into  contact  daily  and  almost  unconscious- 
ly with  beautiful  things"  and  since  pictures  and  objects 
of  art  and  criticism  become  unreal  and  artificial  when 
immured  in  isolated  museums  which  can  be  visited  only 

[249] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

at  spare  times  and  with  effort,  "schools  where  the  chil- 
dren are  busy  all  day  long"  in  healthy  cycles  of  play- 
study-work,  play-study-work  like  the  religion-crit- 
icism-science-art of  our  psychological  and  logical  anal- 
ysis of  life  in  this  book.  These  schools  are  living  ex- 
amples of  an  essentially  liberal  education  in  our  period 
triumphing  in  the  face  of  the  opposition  of  business- 
men of  the  Steel  Corporation  at  Gary,  who  see  in  these 
children,  not  those  who  will  be  "disciplined"  into 
a  servile  "duty"  which  will  make  them  the  docile  suc- 
cessors of  the  "cheap  labor"  of  today,  but  who  see  in 
these  children  rather  those  who  will  rise  to  protest 
against  a  society  wherein  the  few  exploit  the  many. 

A  few  weeks  ago  I  visited  a  Montessori  School  at  the 
moment  when  some  of  the  children  of  six  years  of  age 
were  waiting  on  others  at  lunch.  One  child  was  carry- 
ing out  his  task  wrongly.  He  frowned.  I  watched 
with  interest.  Would  the  frown  deepen  into  stubborn 
pride  when  his  fellows  gently  assisted  him  to  a  recogni- 
tion of  his  awkwardness?  Under  similar  circumstances 
adults  certainly  grow  stubborn  and  sullen.  But  no,  the 
frown  changed  quickly  into  a  smile  of  delighted  recog- 
nition of  the  right  way,  of  a  re-established  identity  with 
his  comrades.  When  that  child  first  entered  the  school 
he  tried  to  possess  his  fellow-pupils  and  teachers  by 
jumping  up  and  down  and  screaming.  "This  is  what  I 
do  when  I  want  anything  at  home,"  said  he  blandly. 

[250] 


EDUCATION 


Now  he  grows  daily  more  serene  and  so  much  more 
interested  in  living  than  in  possessing  other  people's 
lives  that  when  he  grows  up  he  will  find  it  all  but  im- 
possible to  understand  why  his  father  was  a  capitalist 
except  by  a  feat  of  historical  imagination. 

But  wherever  there  is  an  adaptation  to  a  remote  end 
by  the  use  of  meager  educational  means  (study  to  pro- 
duce the  traditionalistic  pseudo-broadmindedness  of 
the  "gentleman"  or  the  neo-aristocratic  "leader,"  the 
training  in  the  "humanities"  in  the  old  sense)  forced 
upon  students  in  the  sacred  name  of  "discipline,"  then 
we  have  an  illiberal  education,  based  on  the  "idols  of 
the  tribe,"  in  which  youth  is  prepared  by  a  long  period 
of  hot-housing  from  contemporary  currents  of  life. 

Self-control  for  a  great  purpose  is  a  matter  of  self- 
discipline,  not  of  irrational,  unconvinced  servility  to  co- 
ercive influences  miscalled  discipline.  Self-discipline, 
however,  requires  as  its  source  of  inspiration  a  teacher 
who  will  lead  out  a  student  before  sweeping  vistas  at 
times  and  at  times  will  confront  him  with  multitudes 
of  practical  dilemmas  which  will  stir  him  to  loyalty  in 
Royce's  fine  sense  of  the  term,  "a  willing  and  thorough- 
going devotion  to  a  cause,"  a  "practical"  devotion  to  a 
cause  which  is  "superpersonal"  as  well  as  personal. 
People  will  retort  wearily  that  this  requires  teachers 
of  genius  and  that  teachers  of  genius  are  as  rare  as  great 
poets.  But  we  shall  endeavor  presently  to  show  that 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

an  educational  organization  is  possible  in  which  any 
teacher  who  has  health  and  a  modicum  of  industry 
could  develop  a  great  variety  of  means  to  encourage 
the  student  to  use  a  great  variety  of  means. 

In  America  Charles  William  Eliot  did  take  some 
steps  towards  a  truly  democratic  education  when  he 
established  the  "elective  system."  But  his  scheme  did 
not  provide  for  the  principle  of  self-discipline  because 
it  was  naively  empirical  rather  than  experimental. 
Doctor  Eliot  gave  us  an  uncriticized  religious  vision. 
But  he  left  his  students  to  the  trial  and  error  method 
of  the  animals.  It  was  only  an  opposite  extreme  to  the 
method  which  gave  the  student  little  or  no  choice.  In 
consequence  certain  revisionists  have  produced  a 
"group  elective  system."  Prof.  H.  H.  Home  lauds  this 
last  as  a  synthesis  of  all  that  is  best  in  the  required  and 
the  elective  modes.  But  Professor  Home  is  misled  by 
a  rather  artificial  Hegelian  way  of  thinking.  The 
group  elective  system  is,  indeed,  a  "synthesis,"  but  it  is 
a  synthesis  of  all  that  is  worst  in  the  earlier  methods. 
The  advocates  of  the  required  course  made  and  make 
the  mistake  of  supposing  that  no  autonomous  act  or 
choice  by  an  adolescent  can  be  sound.  The  champions 
of  free  election  slighted,  on  the  other  hand,  the  neces- 
sity of  a  sort  of  psychoanalytical  co-operation  between 
teacher  and  student  because,  in  their  eagerness  to  de- 
stroy the  old  pedagogical  absolutism,  their  eyes  were 

[252] 


EDUCATION 


not  open  to  the  experimental  method  of  science  and 
they  were  intoxicated  with  an  eighteenth  century  politi- 
cal philosophy  as  it  was  swaggeringly  worked  out  in 
English  and  American  industrialism.  Now  the  group 
elective  system  does  allow  the  student  to  do  some  choos- 
ing and  does  encourage  half-heartedly  a  system  of  facul- 
ty-advisors. But  this  apparent  synthesis  of  the  best  is  but 
a  false  dawn.  The  student  does  not  choose  experimen- 
tally a  study  or  a  few  studies,  feeling  his  way  with  logi- 
cal caution  and  emotional  sincerity  and  intimacy  in  close 
comradeship  with  a  professor  who  has  a  synoptic  view 
of  the  value  of  courses  and  a  psychological  insight  into 
personalities.  On  the  contrary,  the  student  commits 
himself  almost  immediately  to  the  momentous  and 
hopelessly  a  priori  choice  of  a  college  and  a  life  career. 
He  is  now  almost  as  rigorously  condemned  to  his  a 
priori  as  students  in  the  old  universities  were  con- 
demned to  requirements  which,  if  somewhat  narrow 
and  very  inflexible,  were  at  least  thoughtfully  selected 
by  one  of  the  parties  of  the  contract.  But  under  the 
group  elective  system  the  student  discovers  usually,  at 
the  end  of  two  or  three  years  that  he  has  chosen  un- 
wisely. Helplessly  he  looks  around  and  finds  that 
brazen  doors  have  closed  behind  his  forced  and  prema- 
ture confession  of  a  life-purpose.  Readjustment  is  a 
most  difficult  matter  in  what  he  now  discovers  to  be  a 
prison  condemning  him  to  useless,  galling,  stunting 

[253] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

labor.  Thus  the  ghost  of  the  old  "humanistic"  educa- 
tion, a  perversion  of  it  far  worse  than  the  system  itself 
when  it  really  flourished,  has  slunk  back  with  the  reac- 
tionaries to  check  the  natural  improvements  which 
might  rationally  have  been  made  in  the  bold  if  some- 
what sentimental  scheme  of  Doctor  Eliot. 

We  cannot  commit  ourselves  to  a  definition  of  lib- 
eral education  which  will  be  precisely  applicable  in  any 
age  or  comfortably  absolute  even  for  an  hour.  We 
may  say  abstractly  that  its  essential  nature  implies  a 
reconciliation  of  discipline  and  interest,  culture  and 
utility,  play  and  work.  But  the  definition,  to  be  really 
specific  and  vital,  must  be  formulated  over  again  in 
every  period,  though  with  all  possible  respect  for  the 
formulations  of  earlier  times  and  other  races.  It  must 
be,  like  all  other  laws,  a  working-hypothesis.  To  learn 
how  to  reformulate  our  definition  or  law  for  this  age, 
those  of  us  who  are  in  universities  had  best  get  over 
our  academic  Olympianism  and  go  very  humbly  to 
certain  enlightened  teachers  of  children  who  (perhaps 
because  they  have  lived  near  those  whose  artistic  move- 
ments and  religious  imagination  is  purer  than  ours  and 
more  vigorous)  seem  to  have  been  taught  by  their  pu- 
pils many  methods  which  (after  due  critical  purifica- 
tion) they  have  used  to  initiate  a  genuine  liberal  and 
liberating  education.  This  is  to  converge  towards  that 
other  great  recognition  on  the  part  of  forward-looking 

[254] 


EDUCATION 


intellectuals  that  the  new  society  must  be  reconstructed 
from  the  bottom  up  just  as  the  syndicalists  say,  that  the 
intellectual  must  content  himself  with  giving  sym- 
phonic structure  to  the  proletarian  melodies  of  truth, 
life.  In  precisely  this  spirit  the  schools  of  Mr.  Wirt 
at  Gary  are  fundamentally  conceived,  as  Randolph 
Bourne  noted,  to  be  "as  much  as  possible  a  self-sustain- 
ing child  community"  since  "  'all  other  child-welfare 
agencies  do  not  occupy  the  time  of  all  the  children  for 
more  than  an  average  of  ten  minutes  a  day'  "  and  since 
children  are  generally  debauched  by  one  of  two  repres- 
sive influences:  "  'irksome  child  labor  and  demoraliz- 
ing child  idleness.' '  Thus  the  Gary  Schools  serve 
many  purposes  lost  when  the  Industrial  Revolution 
shattered  the  homes  of  the  proletariat  and  (more 
subtly)  of  the  well-to-do.  These  pioneer  schools  are 
"not  only  a  'preparation  for  life'  "  but  "  'a  life  itself,' ' 
a  public-school  "in  the  same  broad  sense  that  streets 
and  parks  are  public"  where  "the  child  would  not 
'graduate,'  'complete  his  or  her  education,'  but  would 
tend  to  drift  back  constantly  to  school  to  get  the  help 
he  or  she  needed  in  profession  or  occupation  or  to  keep 
enjoying  the  facilities  which  even  the  wealthy  private 
home  would  not  be  able  to  afford,"  thus  "making  the 
public  schools  veritable  'schools  for  the  public.'  "  Here 
the  child  participates,  co-operates,  discovers  his  auton- 
omy quite  soberly  just  as  the  proletariat  is  discovering 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

its  autonomy,  learns  to  fear  no  longer  his  wish  to  love  as 
the  proletariat  learns  to  fear  no  longer  its  wish  to  love. 

We  cannot  reconcile  drudgery,  play,  and  work,  cul- 
ture and  utility,  discipline,  influence,  and  interest,  the 
beautiful  and  the  lovely  and  the  ugly  with  absolute  cer- 
tainty for  all  time.  But  we  may  define  a  liberal  educa- 
tion for  our  own  age  as  the  rational  verification,  by  a 
great  variety  of  means,  of  purposes  both  immediate 
and  remote  in  a  process  in  which  the  individual  stu- 
dent and  teacher  co-operate,  in  which  the  teacher  aids 
the  student  and  the  student  teaches  the  teacher,  in 
which  the  student,  through  that  self-discipline  which 
flowers  with  the  discovery  of  his  autonomy,  elects  ra- 
tionally and  pursues  rationally  his  own  course,  a  proc- 
ess of  election  which  is  co-extensive  with  his  life,  in 
which  play  finds  its  fulfillment  or  sublimation  in  work, 
in  which  the  fundamental  wish  to  love  is  made  free. 

Enlightened  by  the  militant  proletariat  and  by  the 
teachers  of  children,  those  of  us  who  teach  in  American 
universities  may  develop  the  experimental  spirit  in 
three  directions  as  far  as  the  immediate  future  is  con- 
cerned: (i)  towards  a  freer  intercourse  between  mem- 
bers of  the  faculties  leading  to  a  transformation  of  the 
present  possessive  compartments  into  genuine  creative 
departments  and  a  consequent  revolution  of  the  me- 
thodological principles  which  underly  many  of  the 
studies;  (2)  a  rejection  of  the  required,  elective,  and 

[256] 


EDUCATION 


group  elective  systems  for  one  of  very  elaborate  psy- 
choanalytical co-operation  between  each  student  and 
certain  cultured  and  psychologically  expert  faculty  ad- 
visors who  do  nothing  else  and  who  equal  in  numbers 
fully  a  third  of  the  regular  faculty  in  any  well-manned 
university;  (3)  a  thoroughgoing  rejection  of  both  the 
recitation  and  the  lecture  system  (as  commonly  prac- 
tised) for  the  method  of  discussion  and  of  communal 
production  which  the  proletarians  are  at  present  per- 
fecting— wherever  they  are  allowed  to  have  strictly 
self-supporting  forums — to  a  point  beyond  that  attained 
to  by  the  ancient  Greeks.  We  may  now  consider  in 
some  detail  how  simple  and  practical  the  beginnings 
of  such  activities  may  be,  how  far-reaching  are  their 
potentialities. 

Members  of  faculties  could  begin  their  efforts  to- 
wards a  better  mutual  understanding  and  towards  re- 
vised methodologies  very  simply  by  visiting  each 
other's  courses.  The  old  tradition,  based  on  a  senti- 
mental, laissez-faire  conception  of  "academic  free- 
dom," that  every  professor's  class-room  should  be  a 
sanctum  sanctorum  to  which  no  colleague  should  be 
admitted,  is  happily  waning.  And  the  adventurous  col- 
lege teacher  will  be  amazed,  if  he  will  but  try,  to  dis- 
cover how  hospitably  many  of  his  colleagues  will  reply 
to  a  frank  personal  appeal.  But  that  will  be  only  the 
first  of  a  series  of  delightful  surprises.  If  our  adventur- 

[257] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

ous  professor  is  sensible  enough  to  choose  for  his  first 
visits  a  course  in  some  subject  not  too  obviously  close 
to  his  own  and  yet  not  too  remote,  if  he  attends  regu- 
larly and  does  a  fair  part  of  the  class-vvork  he  will  be 
amazed  to  find  his  colleague's  problems  in  philosophy 
or  economics  or  comparative  psychology  are  sometimes 
precisely  his  own  in  literature.  He  will  be  delight- 
fully disillusioned  of  his  fatalistic  belief  that  university 
professors  are  hopelessly  committed  to  a  situation  like 
those  who  were  stricken  at  the  Tower  of  Babel.  He 
will  begin  to  discuss  these  common  problems  eagerly 
in  his  literary  jargon  and  his  host  will  reply  with  equal 
gusto  in  the  jargon  of  biology  or  of  metaphysics.  He 
will  find  that  he  can  well  spare  for  this  a  good  deal 
of  the  time  that  he  was  giving  to  far  less  salubrious 
forms  of  recreation.  He  will  prevail  upon  his  indul- 
gent host  to  become  his  own  guest  and  discuss  with  his 
own  pupils  the  relations  of  certain  problems  in  liter- 
ary criticism  to  the  question  of  instinct  and  intelligence 
or  the  similarity  in  the  logical  implications  of  a  "ju- 
dicial critic"  like  Addison  and  a  "continental  rational- 
ist" like  Leibnitz.  Then,  of  a  sudden,  he  will  discover 
some  day  that  a  problem  with  which  he  had  grappled 
for  years  in  vain,  about  which  he  had  lamely  apolo- 
gized to  his  classes  for  years,  becomes  clear  in  some 
happy  moment  when,  with  his  mind  apparently  far 
from  Taine's  History  of  English  Literature,  he  listens 

[258] 


EDUCATION 


to  some  comrade  discussing  with  a  class  in  ethnology 
the  habits  of  Negritos.  Often,  too,  he  will  find,  when 
he  sits  down  of  an  evening,  after  a  long  day  of  teaching 
and  visiting  courses,  to  prepare  his  own  work  for  the 
morrow,  that  his  work  is  already  almost  prepared,  that 
the  things  which  he  heard  in  his  colleagues'  courses  are 
absolutely  apropos  immediately,  that  the  time  which 
he  thought  was  sacrificed  to  extra  toil  and  remote  pros- 
pects was  really  a  wisely  spent  part  of  the  day's  work 
for  which  he  is  paid,  that  he  is  not  only  prepared  but 
far  more  freshly  prepared  than  he  would  have  been  had 
he  spaded  and  ploughed  as  usual  in  his  old  field,  sub- 
jected as  it  is  by  long  and  rather  unintelligent  tilling 
to  the  law  of  decreasing  returns. 

With  a  fraternity  of  college  professors  visiting  freely 
each  other's  courses,  entering  into  class  discussions, 
eager  for  the  real  symposium,  universities  should  take 
the  first  humble  but  momentous  step  towards  becoming 
self-sustaining  communities  and  showing  the  reaction- 
aries of  the  world  a  better  life  than  that  prescribed  by 
intranational  paternalism  and  inter-national  imperial- 
ism. In  days  when  "efficiency"  has  a  malevolent  as 
well  as  a  benignant  meaning  we  must  keep  Randolph 
Bourne's  sentences  in  mind  every  minute:  "There  is  a 
danger  that  we  shall  create  capable  administrators  fas- 
ter than  we  create  imaginative  educators.  It  is  so  easy 
to  forget  that  this  tightening  of  the  machinery  is  only 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

that  the  product  may  be  finer  and  richer."  With  such 
contingencies  in  view  professors  should  pass  from  their 
informal  visitings  and  discussions  to  more  formal  or- 
ganization, not  on  the  pattern  of  the  moribund  associa- 
tion of  American  professors  which  is  too  much  like 
the  more  snobbish  and  timorous  craft  unions,  but  on  the 
pattern  of  the  industrial  unions  which  the  syndicalistic 
spirit  is  expanding,  unions  which  would  include  the 
teachers  in  high-schools  and  the  teachers  of  smaller 
children  (the  most  creative  of  all  of  us)  on  a  basis  of 
rational  equality,  unions  which  would  thus  attack,  the 
problem  of  education  not  with  a  vague  paternalistic 
radiation  downward  from  olympian,  academic  heights 
but  from  the  bottom  up,  unions  which  would  safeguard 
schools  from  the  tyrannous  interference  of  the  State  and 
the  invertebrate  public,  unions  which  would  make 
trustees  and  regents  practically  unnecessary,  unions 
which  would  insist  that  college  presidents  and  high- 
school  principals  and  superintendents  should  be  some- 
thing other  than  business-men  and  politicians  in  the 
degraded  American  sense  of  the  term.  These  unions 
should  recognize  immediately  their  productive  affilia- 
tions with  all  other  labor-unions.  It  is  most  hearten- 
ing to  see  the  more  aggressive  high-school  teachers  affil- 
iating with  the  American  Federation  of  Labor.  And 
the  University  of  Illinois  will  some  day  be  very  proud 
of  the  fact  that  its  teachers  set  an  example  to  the  irreso- 

[260] 


EDUCATION 


lute  academicians.  The  reciprocal  influence  of  the 
loose  and  very  variant  American  trade-unions  and  the 
forward-looking  teachers  who  recognize  their  own 
status  as  producers  ought  to  develop  rapidly  into  the 
most  brilliantly  reconstructive  tendency  in  twentieth 
century  American  life. 

We  may  make  a  transition  from  the  association  of 
teachers  to  the  teacher-pupil  relation  by  a  brief  glance 
at  some  of  the  new  correlations  of  courses  which  would 
naturally  arise  from  the  activities  already  suggested  for 
teachers.  Many  philosophers,  for  example,  say  arro- 
gantly that  scientists  should  come  to  them  for  criticism. 
The  scientists  have  done  so  repeatedly  but  have,  until 
lately,  been  fed  with  apples  of  ashes.  Philosophers 
could  remedy  this  if,  as  a  few  of  them  have  already 
done,  they  all  would  see  to  it,  without  crude  coercion, 
that  their  own  major  and  graduate  students  we're  so 
distributed  in  their  classes  that  there  would  be  individ- 
uals minoring  not  merely  in  psychology  Cthe  tradi- 
tional minor)  but  also  in  chemistry,  physics,  astronomy, 
geology,  biology,  ethnology,  economics,  and  ready  to 
contribute  facts  and  specific  problems  from  all  these 
subjects  for  philosophical  analysis  and  synthesis.  Many 
students  if  allowed  to  choose  in  accordance  with  that 
experimental  co-operation  with  a  faculty  advisor  which 
I  here  advocate,  would  prefer  one  of  these  subjects  to 
psychology  and  would  therefore  contribute  to  a  more 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

varied  elaboration  of  their  other  favorite  subject.  Phi- 
losophers could  then  bring  them  together  in  a  seminar 
in  the  logic  of  science  conducted,  if  possible,  by  two  in- 
structors who  entertain  different  views  and  who  could 
present  these  views  in  open  discussion  and  debate.  This 
seminar  should  be  the  keystone  of  the  upper  division 
and  graduate  courses  in  philosophy.  Let  us  take  an- 
other example.  If  philology  must  be  correlated  with 
literature  (and  this  is  a  highly  debatable  question)  stu- 
dents of  a  special  literature  and  language  should  be 
advised  (though  not  required)  to  approach  it  through 
a  course  in  general  ethnology,  the  history  of  cultures 
and  of  the  instrumental  force  of  language  in  cultures, 
or,  if  they  preferred,  a  general  course  in  psychology, 
the  study  of  associations,  imagination,  emotions,  reason, 
those  reactions  to  which  literary  men  and  philologians 
are  forever  referring  loosely  without  knowing  what 
they  themselves  mean.  Students  of  psychology  and  stu- 
dents of  ethnology  would  then  be  requested  to  exchange 
their  information  in  the  interpretation  of  the  data 
which  they  would  be  collecting  in  an  intensive  study  of 
a  special  language  and  literature.  At  the  present  time 
our  ethnologists  in  America  are  teaching  philology 
with  far  more  perspective  than  are  the  philologians. 
Again,  no  student  of  political  science  is  likely  to  de- 
serve honors  as  a  senior  or  to  deserve  a  post  graduate 
degree  unless  he  has  attended  classes  where  teachers 

[262] 


EDUCATION 


and  students  brought  in  and  discussed  contributions 
from  philosophy,  from  general  ethnology,  from  com- 
parative and  social  psychology,  and  from  the  rigorous 
criticism  and  comparison  of  historical  methods.  To 
get  a  good  course  in  historical  method  is,  at  present, 
almost  impossible  since,  as  we  saw  in  an  earlier  chapter, 
most  historians  are  afraid  to  reflect  at  all  severely  about 
their  troublesome  presuppositions.  But  good  courses 
in  historical  method  would  grow  rapidly  out  of  the 
visits  and  discussions  we  have  urged  between  members 
of  the  faculty  just  as  Professor  Teggart's  memorable 
book  on  history  grew  out  of  years  of  research  in  the 
fields  of  ethnology,  biology,  psychology,  and  the  logic 
of  science.  Again,  no  advanced  students  in  economics 
should  leave  the  university  without  having  heard  much 
about  the  general  philosophy  and  psychology  of  values. 
And  today  our  teachers  should  see  to  it  that  those  who 
enter  upon  their  first  course  in  strict  theory  of  econom- 
ics should  come  with  contributions  from  courses  pre- 
viously taken,  according  to  their  own  election,  in  ethics, 
introductory  psychology,  zoology,  and  general  evolu- 
tionary theory.  With  what  pleasure  would  the  students 
find  themselves  actually  using  the  things  they  learn! 
All  these  and  many  other  reforms  of  this  sort  could  be 
put  through  immediately  by  any  departments  not  ob- 
sessed in  seeking  aggrandizement  under  a  system  of 
laissez-faire  competition. 

[263] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

Even   the   most   mildly   imaginative   teachers   may 
deepen  the  ties  between  colleagues  and  pupils  in  a  thou- 
sand ways.    Let  us  confine  ourselves  to  two  examples. 
Suppose  a  teacher  with  a  small  class  of  juniors  or  sen- 
iors which  he  has  trained  for  one  semester  in  the  prob- 
lems of  literary  criticism:  Impressionism  versus  judic- 
ial criticism,  "scientific"  or  "historical"  criticism  and 
its  relation  to  "valuation,"  the  controversy  between  the 
literary  utilitarians  or  propagandists  and  the  advocates 
of  art  for  art's  sake,  the  meanings  of  "realism"  and 
"romanticism"  in  literature  and  in  metaphysics.     At 
the  beginning  of  the  second  semester  the  instructor 
could  announce  a  thesis  to  be  constructed  carefully  by 
elaborate  prevision  and  through  frequent  conferences 
with  all  or  most  of  the  student's  teachers,  a  thesis  pri- 
marily literary  but  one  which  would  make  use  of  ma- 
terials obtained  in  other  courses  taken  during  the  same 
semester,  a  thesis  which  would  focus  the  student's  en- 
tire work.    It  is  not  at  all  difficult  to  assist  a  student  to 
a  free  choice  of  a  subject  fulfilling  all  these  require- 
ments.   One  student  might,  for  instance,  go  to  work  on 
Ruskin  trying  to  straighten  out  the  economic  and  esthe- 
tic tangles  in  his  prophecies,  holding  conferences  with 
the  teacher  of  literature,  the  teacher  of  economic  the- 
ory, and  the  teacher  of  philosophy  in  many  a  delightful 
symposium  most  enlightening  to  all  concerned.    In  the 
general   class-discussions   the   instructor   should   con- 

[264] 


EDUCATION 


stantly  encourage  an  approach  to  literature  through 
the  medium  of  other  subjects.  A  mere  perusal  of  a 
chapter  or  two  of  Professor  Veblen's  Theory  of  the 
Leisure  Class,  of  the  articles  on  "Art,  Ornament,  and 
Decoration"  and  on  "Magic,  Religion,  and  Myth"  in 
Professor  Thomas's  Source  Book  of  Social  Origins  will 
with  deep  relevancy  throw  into  sudden  and  vast  per- 
spectives the  problems  which  would  arise  in,  let  us  say, 
the  contrast  of  dramas  by  Maeterlinck  and  by  Ibsen  or 
by  Yeats  and  by  Shaw.  Suppose,  for  our  second  ex- 
ample, an  ordinary  course  in  freshman  English  com- 
position. This  should  never  be,  as  it  so  often  is,  a  course 
in  rules  about  writing  or  in  crossing  t's  and  dotting  i's 
or  in  books  about  books  abstracted  from  life;  it  should 
be  a  course  in  the  practical  creation  of  literature  am- 
bitious or  humble.  At  the  same  time  it  can  be  made  a 
course  in  general  university  orientation.  Each  semester, 
the  class  may  choose  a  rather  large  topic  about  which 
to  focus  all  themes,  oral  and  written,  all  books  read,  all 
informal  class-discussions.  Let  the  topic  be,  for  in- 
stance, "progress."  Let  the  students  first  attempt  a 
theme  on  progress  in  the  United  States  during  the  last 
generation,  thus  somewhat  limiting  the  choice  of  sub- 
ject but  encouraging  them  with  suggestions  to  choose 
any  one  of  innumerable  variations  within  the  broad 
theme.  Let  the  teacher  then  demolish  the  absurdly  op- 
timistic and  sentimental  sketches  that  are  handed  in. 

[265] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

Let  the  many  meanings  of  progress  and  the  profound 
dangers  to  progress  then  emerge  in  reports  and  read- 
ings. Students  may  be  delegated,  as  individuals,  to 
consult  instructors  in  helpful  subjects  like  biology,  eth- 
nology, the  philosophy  of  history.  In  a  time  of  presi- 
dential campaign  a  collective  attempt  by  the  student  to 
formulate  by  a  semester's  research  and  writing  an  in- 
telligible definition  of  "Americanism"  will  keep  every 
individual  on  tiptoe  and  involve  some  delightful  read- 
ing extending  from  Emerson's  "American  Scholar"  to 
William  James'  "Gospel  of  Relaxation."  This  sub- 
ject has,  indeed,  been  made  the  basis  for  some  text- 
books in  composition.  But  with  characteristic  "sanity" 
the  editors  have  anthologized  as  though  such  a  thing 
as  the  labor  movement  never  existed.  "Education"  is 
always  a  valuable  subject  itself  and  a  rich  prelude  for 
an  entire  college  course.  "The  Labor  Movement"  is 
the  most  valuable  and  successful  of  all  that  I  have  tried 
out.  But  always  the  students  should  be  given  one  topic 
to  be  sustained  an  entire  semester  so  that  they  may  ac- 
cumulate something  to  write  about  instead  of  drawing 
from  a  vacuum.  In  such  a  course  as  the  one  prescribed 
it  is  impossible  for  them  to  depend  on  the  eleventh  hour 
inspiration  to  dash  off  a  thoughtless  essay  in  impeccable 
or  faulty  but  always  empty  rhetoric;  in  such  a  course 
they  are  bound  to  have  thought  about  most  of  their 

[266] 


EDUCATION 


themes  for  weeks  and  to  have  exchanged  ideas  in  free 
co-operation  with  fellow-students  and  teachers. 

It  is  perfectly  possible  that  relations  between  faculty 
and  students  could  be  made  more  rich  and  loving  by  an 
imaginative  contribution  to  the  out-of-doors  drama 
which  is  becoming  so  popular  in  America.  Such  a 
production  as  the  "Partheneia"  at  the  University  of 
California  could  readily  be  expanded  to  include  stu- 
dents of  both  sexes  and  members  of  the  faculty.  It  is 
quite  astounding  to  those  who  have  had  practical  ex- 
perience with  these  activities  to  see  how  quickly  a  large 
number  of  people  will  have  contributed  to  the  creation 
of  these  spectacles,  how  blurred  becomes  the  sense  of 
what  I  wrote  or  did  and  what  you  wrote  or  did,  of  who 
first  thought  of  this  entrance  and  who  first  suggested 
that  color-combination.  The  days  of  communal-com- 
position are  not  irrevocable.  Indeed,  in  an  age  so 
grimly  communalized  by  machinery,  the  only  way  in 
which  we  can  make  machines  our  slaves  instead  of  our 
masters  is  by  suffusing  all  the  processes  with  a  new 
communal  artistry.  These  university  masques  and 
pageants  might  well  become  apprentice  training  in  that 
sort  of  reconstruction.  And  if  we  are  careful  to  avoid 
artificial  rituals  in  pale  imitation  of  some  primitive  or 
medieval  performance,  if  we  purge  ourselves  of  senti- 
mental patriotism,  these  affairs  may  assume  the  pro- 
portions of  very  serious  and  very  joyous  out-of-door  and 

[267] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

in-door  music-dramas  with  huge  panoramic  effects  and 
long  perspectives  that  would  fulfill  Wagner's  most  ecs- 
tatic dream  of  the  wedding  of  the  arts.  Perhaps,  too, 
acting  would  be  rid  of  its  present  gravely  psychopatho- 
logical  defects  when  we  all  learned  to  act. 

Every  university  and  college  should  have  a  very 
elaborate  advisor-faculty,  as  we  have  noted,  composed 
of  men  trained  with  a  synoptic  view  of  the  values  of 
various  studies  and  with  an  expert  psychological 
knowledge  of  human  individuals.  These  men,  we  sug- 
gested, should  be  equal  in  number  to  at  least  a  third 
of  the  present  faculties.  Their  duties  should  be  con- 
fined to  personal  conferences  of  one  hour  once  a  week 
with  students  as  individuals  for  every  semester  of  the 
four  years.  The  method  of  the  conference  should  be 
psychoanalytical  in  the  sense  that  the  work  should  be 
done  almost  entirely  by  the  student,  that  the  advisor 
should  restrict  himself  to  certain  bits  of  information 
(when  these  are  asked  for)  and  to  revealing  to  the  stu- 
dent his  compromises,  his  acts  untrue  to  his  own  nature, 
without  prescribing  at  all  the  acts  which  might  seem 
to  the  advisor  to  be  true  to  the  student's  essential  per- 
sonality. This  psychoanalytical  advisorship  should  be 
then  a  course  in  general  university  orientation  and  in 
the  discovery  by  the  student  of  his  autonomy.  It  would 
involve  a  most  intimate  confession  by  the  student  of  his 
own  life  and  milieu  and  aspirations  and  fears  and  com- 

[268] 


EDUCATION 


pulsions.  The  advisor  and  his  young  comrades  would 
proceed  experimentally.  If  there  appeared  to  be  on  the 
student's  part  a  definite  distaste  for  a  subject  he  had 
chosen,  if  his  views  of  his  aims  changed  vitally,  the  ex- 
perimenting advisor  and  student  would  have  to  retrace 
their  steps  exactly  as  a  scientist  does  when  a  hypothesis 
is  not  working.  Far  less  time  would  be  wasted  in  this 
apparently  indulgent  way  than  in  the  present  crudely 
empirical  and  crudely  a  priori  methods.  With  such  in- 
timate comradeship  of  advisor  and  pupil  the  elaborate 
documents,  the  administrative  armies,  the  morasses  of 
"laws,"  the  sordid  organization  of  "units"  and  "grades" 
would  be  largely  unnecessary  and  a  considerable  sum 
of  money  could  be  rescued  for  the  employment  of  ad- 
visors which  is  now  poured  into  the  amorphous  lap  of 
a  god  called  "Efficiency." 

As  Professor  Dewey  has  it,  the  old  education  "is  in 
the  teacher,  the  text-book,  anywhere  and  everywhere 
you  please  except  in  the  immediate  instincts  and  activi- 
ties of  the  child  himself.  .  .  .  Now  the  change  which 
is  coming  into  our  education  is  the  shifting  of  the  center 
of  gravity.  It  is  a  change,  a  revolution,  not  unlike  that 
introduced  by  Copernicus  when  the  astronomical  cen- 
ter shifted  from  the  earth  to  the  sun.  In  this  case  the 
child  becomes  the  center  about  which  the  appliances  of 
education  revolve;  he  is  the  center  about  which  they 
are  organized."  There  will  be  a  Copernican  revolu- 

[269] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

tion  of  our  conception  of  the  State  as  we  saw  in  the 
last  chapter.  Hitherto  government  of  the  people,  by 
the  people,  for  the  people  has  not  been  a  reality  except 
in  the  vision  of  a  single  individual  like  Lincoln  whose 
wish  to  love  had  been  almost  completely  released  from 
the  repressions  which  strove  to  hide  it  and  the  compen- 
sations which  strove  to  divert  it  into  vicarious  activities. 
But  Lincoln's  ideal  is  something  for  which  the  whole 
world  now  dares  hope,  Europe  even  more  than  Amer- 
ica. This  democracy  has  been  partially  realized  by 
proletarian  pioneers  and  in  some  child rens'  schools.  To 
make  similar  progress  by  patient  and  humble  experi- 
ment in  the  universities  will  be  to  help  enormously  in 
the  extension  of  our  Copernican  revolution  outward 
and  upward  to  the  State  itself. 

Two  powerful  currents  we  find  converging  and  in 
their  convergence  we  foresee  a  society  far  more  noble 
than  any  which  the  world  has  yet  known  or  even 
dreamed  of  clearly.  The  wage-workers  are  becoming 
less  and  less  willing  to  accept  social  inequality  as  their 
lot.  At  the  same  time  the  radical  scientists  of  human 
nature  are  finding  an  increasing  justification  in  science 
for  the  growing  hope  of  the  wage-workers.  Our  primal 
wish  proves  to  be  the  wish  to  love,  to  share,  to  identify 
ourselves  with  all  men  and  women  and  children,  to  re- 
joice that  we  are  all  alike  made  of  the  same  marvellous 
germ-plasm  upon  which  "nature"  has  been  patiently  at 

[270] 


EDUCATION 


work  for  millions  of  years.  Those  who  feel  most  stead- 
fastly this  truth  and  order  their  lives  in  accordance, 
whether  they  be  "workers  with  the  hand"  or  "workers 
with  the  brain,"  should  be  proud  to  consider  themselves 
of  the  proletariat,  full  of  a  revolutionary  mission.  They 
are  mostly  warmly  infused  with  the  essence  of  religion. 
For  religion  is  not  in  the  churches  nor  is  it  pulsing 
strongly  in  the  hearts  of  our  conservatives.  Religion  is 
the  attitude  of  facing  the  unknown  with  exultant  but 
humble  courage,  with  the  faith  that  "all  is  not  vanity  in 
the  universe,"  with  the  joyous  confidence  that  "every- 
thing natural"  has  a  potential  "ideal  development." 
Real  proletarians  will  not  allow  this  religious  elan  to 
blind  us  to  the  fact  that  we  can  destroy  ourselves  if  we 
are  perverse  enough.  They  will  winnow  their  religion 
constantly  with  criticism  which  will  save  them  from  the 
extremes  alike  of  cynicism  and  of  sentimentalism.  They 
will  remember  that  each  one  is  religious  visionary, 
critic,  scientist  and  artist  (for  these  are  not  subject-mat- 
ters or  vocations  but  stages  in  every  healthy  cycle  of 
thought  and  action)  and  they  will  try  to  neglect  none 
of  these  although  they  may  become  especially  skilfull 
in  one.  They  will  realize  that  the  war  between  nations 
and  the  war  between  classes  has  precipitated  on  the 
largest  scale  yet  dreamed  of  that  "release"  which  always 
marks  the  advancement  of  men  beyond  the  complexes 
or  superstitions  which  lock  them  in  a  living  death. 

[271  ] 


THE  INTELLECTUALS  AND  THE  WAGE  WORKERS 

They  will  find  that  the  feeling  of  freedom  which  ebbs 
and  flows  in  all  of  us  is  at  a  crescendo  now.  They  will 
recognize  the  kinship  between  the  inner  conflict  in  each 
mind  and  the  class-conflict  outside  and  so  they  will  dis- 
cover that  liberty  can  be  conferred  upon  a  person  only 
by  himself  and  that  this  liberty  is  non-resistance  to  his 
own  law  even  though  all  his  vicarious  passions  and 
whims  and  all  the  institutions  of  society  conspire  to 
roar  it  down.  Radical  intellectuals  are  compelled  by 
modern  psychology  to  fuse  economics  with  ethics,  to 
realize  that  economics  cannot  exist  independently  of 
justice,  to  realize  that  "self-interest"  is  not  our  funda- 
mental impulse.  But  radical  intellectuals  are  also 
learning  to  revise  their  concept  of  sovereignty  so  as  to 
avoid  both  the  extremes  of  self-interest  and  centralized 
tyranny  in  favor  of  a  pluralistic  politics  which  is  most 
reverent  of  the  autonomy  of  the  individual.  At  the 
same  time  the  wage-workers  are  fulfilling  these  new 
ideas  in  life  and,  by  a  marvellous  paradox,  are  over- 
whelming their  opponents'  increasing  fear  and  hate 
with  an  increasing  love.  Let  the  intellectuals  hasten 
the  inevitable  convergence  with  the  wage-workers  by 
the  most  thorough  reconstruction  of  educational  meth- 
ods. Every  teacher  should  be  psychoanalyzed,  for 
psychoanalysis  is  the  science  par  excellence  which  gives 
content  to  the  sublime  doctrine  of  the  autonomy  of  the 
individual.  Educators  must  get  over  their  morbid  fear 

[272] 


EDUCATION 


of  play  and  their  morbid  idolatry  of  drudgery  and 
recognize  that  in  the  new  society  work  will  be  the  ful- 
fillment of  play  as  it  already  tends  to  be  for  the  fortu- 
nate children  who  are  taught  in  "the  schools  of  to-mor- 
row." In  the  American  universities  we  must  work  to- 
wards a  freer  intercourse  between  members  of  the  fac- 
ulty including  the  constant  visiting  of  the  courses  of 
colleagues  and  the  constant  collaboration  of  different 
departments.  We  must  work  towards  a  psychoanalyti- 
cal co-operation  between  each  student  and  certain  ex- 
pert faculty  advisers  for  the  purpose  of  the  experimen- 
tal organization  of  courses  and  the  organization  of 
these  courses  into  the  student's  life  with  all  its  conflicts. 
We  must  work  towards  a  rejection  of  recitation  and 
lecture  in  favor  of  something  more  like  the  proletarian 
forum.  Let  all  teachers  form  industrial  unions  and 
affiliate  with  the  wage-workers  to  signalize  the  identity 
of  the  Copernican  revolution  in  education  with  that  in 
the  labor-movement. 


[273] 


MARY  MOWBRAY-CLARKE  HAROLD  A.  LOEB 

MADGE  JENISON  MARJORIE  CONTENT  LOEB 

THE  SUNWISE  TURN,  INC. 

YALE  CLUB  BUILDING 

51  EAST  44th  STREET,  NEW  YORK 

Telephone— Murray  Hill  2590 

PUBLICATIONS 

THE  hope  of  our  enterprise  has  been  to  help  in  the  discovery 
of  all  printed  stimulus  to  creative  effort  and  to  further  that 
synthesizing  process   which   is   modern   criticism   so  that  the 
connections  amongst  the  arts  and  sciences,  and  their  basis  in  reality 
may  be  increasingly  seen. 

"THE  DANCE  OF  SIVA,"   Fourteen   Indian  Essays, 

by   Ananda   Coomaraswamy,  $3.00 

while  written  about  Indian  subjects,  is  a  book  of  idealism  which  interests 
pragmatists  for  its  realistic  basis;  interests  people  of  no  philosophical 
knowledge  for  its  richness  in  information;  interests  artists  for  its  finely 
written  theory  of  beauty  and  its  28  plates;  interests  cooperators  and  guilds- 
men  for  its  simple  statements  of  autonomy,  individuality  and  function  in 
new  relations  to  government;  and  in  the  deluxe  edition,  interests  book- 
collectors  for  its  intrinsic  worth  as  a  handbound  book  on  handmade  paper. 

"RODIN,"  An  Essay,  by  Rawer  Maria  Rilke.  $1.50 

(Uniform  with  Poems  by  the  same  author) 

Rilke,  the  young  romantic  poet,  lived  close  to  Rodin  in  every  sense,  and 
in  a  period  in  which  criticism  of  sculpture  is  nearly  non-existent,  this  in- 
terpretation should  stimulate  to  some  development  a  new  interest  in  that 
branch  of  art  which  fares  worst  amongst  us.  Rodin,  the  great  revealer  of 
the  vitality  in  every  inch  of  surface  on  the  human  body,  has  a  relation  to 
the  psychologists  who  contend  that  every  atom  of  the  body  demands  to 
live.  Everywhere  we  see  these  connections  amongst  creative  people  in  all 
fields  of  research.  Rodin  wrought  his  visual  understandings  into  great 
entities.  Rilke  feels  passionately  their  existence  as  personalities  and  reacts 
to  them  separately  with  full  consciousness  of  their  background,  but  giving 
us  each  to  look  at  on  its  own  merits.  The  translation  by  Jessie  Lemont 
is  admirable. 


PLAYS 

The  Neighborhood  Playhouse  Series  Nos.  1  and  2 

"A  NIGHT  AT  AN   INN."  Lord  Dunsany. 
One  of  the  best  one-act  plays  in  English. 

"GUIBOUR,"    A    Miracle    Play    of    Our    Lady,    translated    by   Anna 

Sprague    MacDonald  $1.00 

from  a  14th  Century  M.S.  Originally  acted  in  the  cathedrals  of  Northern 
France;  produced  for  three  months  in  1919  by  Yvette  Guilbert.  A  delight- 
ful picture  of  the  time  with  its  confiding  belief  in  the  human  qualities  and 
nearness  of  divine  personages,  and,  curiously  enough,  of  interest  now  to 
ttie  psychoanalyst. 


"POT-BOILERS,"   Cliye   Bell  $1..75 

Brilliant  essays  on  subjects  ranging  from  Peacock  to  Ibsen,  and  including 
drastic  comments  on  the  present  real  indifference  to  art  in  the  world. 


The  entire  output  of  literature  on  the  Guilds  ideas  now  interesting 
England  is  collected  by  us  for  presentation  in  American  discussion.  We 
especially  import  the  two  books  of  Arthur  J.  Penty,  a  practising  architect 
p.nd  craftsman  who  is  responsible  for  the  revival  of  the  use  of  the  term 
Guild,  and  largely  for  the  check  to  the  too  materialistic  trend  of  Collectivist 
Socialism  in  England. 

"OLD  WORLDS  FOR  NEW,"  and  $1.75 

"GUILDS  AND  THE  SOCIAL  CRISIS,"  by  Arthur  J.  Penty,  $1.00 

both  make  eloquent  demand  that  the  accent  in  reconstruction-planning  be 
laid  on  quality  in  life,  and  that  the  examination  of  large  scale  production 
should  cease  to  be  made  on  a  basis  of  utility  for  profit,  but  rather  on  a 
basis  of  its  relation  to  human  possibilities  of  growth.  Thus  he  challenges 
industrialism  itself,  not  merely  capitalism,  showing  that  an  entirely  social- 
ized world  would  still  contain  as  many  warped  and  stunted  beings  as  ours 
does  if  industrialism  were  accepted  with  its  almost  microbic  paralysis  of 
t!ie  creative  will. 


We  import  many  interesting  works  of  the  smaller  crafts  presses  in 
England,  and  shall  have,  after  our  removal,  similar  examples  of  fine  press- 
work  from  France  and  Italy.  We  have  now 

"WHERE  THE  GREAT  CITY  STANDS,"  by  C.  R.  Ashbee  $8.00 

a  study,  finely  illustrated,  of  the  new  civics,  printed  at  Essex  House  Press, 

"VEGETABLE  DYES,"   by  Ethel  Mairet,  $3.50 

"AN    ESSAY    ON    CRAFTS    AND    OBEDIENCE,"    by    Ethel    and 

P.  A.   Mairet  and  $1.00 

"AN  ESSAY  ON  SCULPTURE,"  by  Eric  Gill,  $1.00 

winch  issue  from  the  press  of   St.  Dominic  at  Ditchling  in  Essex. 

We  have  in  stock  all  the  books  referred  to  by  Dr.  Cory  in  "The  In- 
tellectuals and  the  Wage  Workers," — "Processes  of  History."  by  F.  J. 
Teggart,  Books  on  Psychoanalysis,  Etc.,  the  works  of  Wallas,  Hobson, 
Cole,  Orage,  Bourne,  MacDougal,  Price,  Veblen,  Burrow,  Russell,  Trotter, 
etc. 


In  ordering,   postage  must  always  be  included. 


UC  SOUTHERN  REGIONAL  LIBRARY  FACILITY 


A    000978153     5 


University  o 


CI39 


